A celebrated lawsuit in Alsace, pleaded by his friend and compatriot Ignace Chauffour, aroused his interest by reviving the question of the origin of the feudal laws, and gradually led him to study the formation of those laws and the early growth of the feudal system.
A cortes held at Evora (1481) empowered judges nominated by the Crown to administer justice in all feudal domains.
A generation before it is certain that England would have been convulsed by a great feudal rising when such an opportunity was granted to the barons.
A marriage between the heiress of Castelbo and Roger Bernard, count of Foix, carried the rights of the above-named Spanish counts into the house of Foix, and hence subsequently to the crown of France, when the heritage of the feudal system was absorbed by the sovereign; but the bishops of Urgel claimed certain rights, which after long disputes were satisfied by the "Act of Division" executed in 1278.
A system of feudal service-tenures (lala) is the institution on which their social and political fabric mainly depended.
A treaty with the English which secured the district of Agenais for France was followed by a feudal war in Guienne.
Above all, he had secured the future by associating his son Robert with him on the throne; and although the nobles and the archbishop of Reims were disturbed by this suspension of the feudal right of election, and tried to oppose it, they were unsuccessful.
According to feudal law the vassal usage.
Actual government in the feudal age was primitive and undifferentiated.
Actually not even in the most regular of feudal countries, like England or Germany, was there any fixed gradation of rank, titles or size.
After long debates the law abolishing feudal services - the sole permanent outcome of the revolution - was carried on the 31st of August, and on the 7th of September received the imperial consent.
After the conquest of the Saracens and the Saxons, the defeat of the Northmen, and the suppression of the feudal revolts, the emperor abdicated in favour of his son Louis (Le Couronnement Looys, 12th century).
After the English had evacuated French territory Charles still had to cope with feudal revolt, and with the hostility of the dauphin, who was in open revolt in 1446, and for the next ten years ruled like an independent sovereign in Dauphine.
After the treaties with the Danes, the tendency is to simplify distinctions on the lines of an opposition between twelvehynd-men and twyhyndmen, paving the way towards the feudal distinction between the free and the unfree.
Agreeably to feudal customs, these nobles, as they grew in power, retired from the town, and built themselves fortresses on points of vantage in the neighborhood.
Although the characteristic titles of voivode, knez and ban (all implying military as well as civil authority) are of Slavonic origin, and perhaps derived from the practice of the later Bulgarian (or Bulgaro-Vlachian) empire, the growth of Vlach feudal institutions is attributed to German influences, which permeated through Hungarian channels into the Vlach world, and transformed the primitive tribal chiefs into a feudal aristocracy of boiars or boyards 2 (nobles).
Although they made some concessions, .the Beaujeus succeeded in maintaining the results of the previous reign, and in triumphing over the feudal intrigues and coalitions, as was seen from the meeting of the estates general in 1484, and the results of the "Mad War" (1485) and the war with Brittany (1488); and in spite of the efforts of Maximilian of Austria they concluded the marriage of Charles VIII.
Among Round's works may be mentioned Feudal England (1895); Geoffrey de Mandeville (1892); and Studies on the Red Book of the Exchequer (1898).
And in their indifference to the distinctions of race and nationality they merely accommodated themselves to the spirit which had become characteristic of chivalry itself, already recognized, like the church, as a universal institution which knit together the whole warrior caste of Christendom into one great fraternity irrespective alike of feudal subordination and territorial boundaries.
Around the sovereign was his Curia Regis or body of councillors, of whom the most important were the justiciar, the chancellor and the treasurer, though the feudal officers, the constable and marshal, were also to be found there.
As at least four-fifths of the land of England had fallen into the kings hands between 1066 and 1074, and had been actually regranted to new ownersforeigners to whom the feudal system was the only conceivable organization of political existencethe change was not only easy but natural.
As feudal customs grew more stereotyped, the sword and sceptre, emblematic respectively of service and military command and of judicial prerogatives, became the usual emblems of investiture of laymen.
As meaning some form of feudal service rendered by tenants to their superiors, it survived for a long time in the Scottish phrase "arriage and carriage," this form of the word being due to a contraction into "arage."
As regards his military system, Akbar invented a sort of feudal organization, by which every tributary raja took his place by the side of his own Mogul nobles.
As soon as we begin to know anything of the Druses they were living in a feudal state of society, as village communities under sheikhs, themselves generally subordinate to one or more amirs.
As such a novum salutis genus, the Crusades connect themselves with the history of the penitentiary system; as the foreign policy of the Church they belong to that clerical purification and direction of feudal society and its instincts, which appears in the institution of "God's Truce" and in chivalry itself.
As the result of his steadiness of aim and patient sagacity, at the end of his reign the Crown was victorious over the feudal nobility and the royal domain extended to the frontiers along with royal authority.
As to the barons, the king took the important constitutional step of conceding that he would not ask them to serve abroad as a feudal obligation, but would pay them for their services, if they would oblige him by joining his banner.
As we have already noticed, medieval serfdom in the West was the result of a process of customary feudal growth hardly interfered with by central governments.
At a convivial gathering on the, 8th of November he supported a toast to "the speedy abolition of all hereditary titles and feudal distinctions," and gave proof of his zeal by expressly repudiating his own title - a performance for which he was dismissed from the army.
At home he endeavoured to reform administration, to encourage agriculture and commerce, and to secure the loyalty of the nobles by grants of land and privileges so extensive that, towards the end of his reign, many nobles who exercised their full feudal rights had become almost independent princes.
At Mile End the king met Wat Tyler; a lengthy and tumultuous conference, during which several persons were slain, took place, in which Tyler demanded the immediate abolition of serfdom and all feudal services, and the removal of all restrictions on freedom of labour and trade, as well as a general amnesty for the insurgents.
At the Restoration the Irish parliament granted an hereditary revenue to the king, an excise for the maintenance of the army, a subsidy of tonnage and poundage for the navy, and a tax on hearths in lieu of feudal burdens.
At the same time the barons, headed by the earls of Norfolk and Hereford, raised the old grievance about feudal service beyond seas, which had been so prominent in the time of King John.
Before the Manchurian conquest the Mongols were governed by their own feudal princes, who regarded themselves as being descended from seven different ancestors, all, however of the same kin.
Before we leave the history of feudal origins another word is necessary.
Below the feudal nobility and their Moslem soldiers came the Christian serfs, tillers of the soil and taxpayers, whose lives and property were at the mercy of their lords.
Below the king was a numerous and powerful class of nobles, the highest of whom (tlatoani) were great vassals owing little more than homage and tribute to their feudal lord, while the natural result of the unruliness of the noble class was that the king to keep them in check increased their numbers, brought them to the capital as councillors, and balanced their influence by military and household officers, and by a rich and powerful merchant class.
Besides homagium ligeum, there was a kind of homage which imposed no feudal duty; this was homagium per paragium, such as the dukes of Normandy rendered to the kings of France, and as the dukes of Normandy received from the dukes of Brittany.
Besides the imperial cities, and the princes and other immediate nobles, there were the mediate nobles, the men who held land in fief of the highest classes of the aristocracy, and who, in virtue of this feudal relation, looked down upon the allodial proprietors or freemen, and upon the burghers.
Both in Europe and in Asia small feudal or aristocratic states tended to consolidate themselves into monarchies, but whereas in Europe from the early days of Rome onwards royalty has often been driven out and replaced temporarily or permanently by popular government, this change seems not to occur in Asia, where revolution means only a change of dynasty.
Both these rulers, by the institution of separate and almost independent duchies, attempted to introduce into Sweden a feudal system similar to that already established elsewhere in Europe; but the danger of thus weakening the realm by partition was averted, though not without violent and tragic complications.
Burgesses could buy and possess property in towns, which knights were forbidden to acquire; and though they could not intermarry with the feudal classes, it was easy and regular for a burgess to thrive to knighthood.
But although in strict logic the feudal causes concerning them should have been judged by them alone, they could not maintain this right in the curia regis; the other persons sitting in it could also take part in judging causes which concerned the peers.
But by the decree of the 4th of August, which in the general abolition of feudal rights involved the possessions of many German princes enclaves in Alsace and Lorraine, the Constituent Assembly had made the first move in the war against the established European system.
But he was cunning, strong-handed and energetic; clearly the Red King would be an undesirable master to those who loved feudal anarchy.
But in any event it is manifest that their condition was in many respects similar to that of a vast number of unquestionably feudal and military tenants who made their appearance after the Norman Conquest.
But in fact the glyptic artists of Tokyo, Osaka and KiOto, though they now devote their chisels chiefly to works of more importance than the netsuke, are in no sense inferior to their predecessors of feudal days, and many beautiful netsuke bearing their signatures are in existence.
But it is clear that from a comparatively early period bannerets whose claims were founded on personal distinction rather than on feudal tenure gradually came to the front, and much the same process of substitution appears to have gone on in their case as that which we have marked in the case of simple knights.
But it must also be remembered that a feudal army was an inefficient weapon for long wars, and that the mercenaries, by whom alone it could be replaced, were both expensive and untrustworthy.
But it was used in France to describe a feudal lord, the supreme suzerain being the king.
But progress was slow, and was accompanied by measures which abolished the states general, the last survival of feudal liberties.
But such transfers of human chattels occur seldom, and there is nothing during the English feudal period corresponding to the brisk trade in men characteristic of the ancient world.
But the hereditable jurisdictions and feudal powers, as of calling out tenants by the fiery cross and punishing the peaceful by burning their cottages, had never been abolished; the chief's will was law, and if the chiefs headed a rising, their clansmen would follow them, willingly or " forced out."
But the king had another force in addition to the feudal levy - a paid force of soudoyers, 2 holding fiefs, not of land, but of pay (fiefs de soudee).
But the members of the feudal court met, not to fulfil a duty owed to the community, but a private obligation which they had assumed in return for the fiefs they held, and in the history of institutions it is differences of this sort which are the determining principles.
But the real sovereign of Mecca and the Hejaz is the sherif, who, as head of a princely family claiming descent from the Prophet, holds a sort of feudal position.
But the relation of subordination of one state to another was generally expressed in terms of feudal law.
But the whole course of this expansion had been watched with suspicion by Japan, from the time of the Saghalien incident of 1875, when the island power, then barely emerging from the feudal age, had to cede her half of the island to Russia, to the Shimonoseki treaty of 1895, when the powers compelled her to forego the profits of her victory over China.
But this laudation of times past concentrates itself almost wholly on the person of the sainted king whom, while with feudal independence he had declined to swear fealty to him, "because I was not his man," he evidently regarded with an unlimited reverence.
By 1176 the Florentines were masters of all the territory comprised in the dioceses of Florence and Fiesole; but civil commotion within nobles, headed by the Alberti and strengthened by the many feudal families who had been forced to leave their castles and dwell in the city (1177-1180).
By De Donis the tenant for life was prevented from selling his estate, which could only pass to his lawful heir; if he had none, it fell back to his feudal superior.
By degrees, however, the progresses of the feudal chiefs to and from Yedo, which at first were simple and economical, developed features of competitive magnificence, and the importance of good roads and suitable accommodation received increased attention.
Cesare, who renounced his cardinalate, was sent on a mission to France at the end of the year, bearing a bull of divorce for the new king Louis XII., in exchange for which he obtained the duchy of Valentinois (hence his title of Duca Valentino) and a promise of material assistance in his schemes to subjugate the feudal princelings of Romagna; he married a princess of Navarre.
Champagne; while the treaty of May 20th, 1186, was his first rough lesson to the feudal leagues, which he had reduced to powerlessness, and to the subjugated duke of Burgundy and count of Flanders.
Charlemagne had for the moment succeeded in uniting western Europe under his sway, but he had not been able to arrest its evolution towards feudal dismemberment.
Charles headed the party of feudal reaction, and was among those who compassed the ruin of Enguerrand de Marigny.
Charles's son, Pippin, was crowned king of Italy, entered the peninsula at the head of the Franks, defeated the Lombards, took Ravenna and presented it to the pope, while retaining a feudal superiority.
Chartier lays bare the abuses of the feudal army and the sufferings of the peasants.
Chow was a feudal kingdom.
Constantine Mavrocordato was the author of really liberal reforms. He introduced an urbarium or land law, limiting to 24 the days of angaria, or forced labour, owed yearly by the peasants to their feudal lord.
Count Stadion began it in Galicia, where, before bombarding insurgent Cracow into submission (April 26), he had won over the Ruthenian peasants by the abolition of feudal dues and by forwarding a petition to the emperor for the official recognition of their language alongside Polish.
Customs of succession were also peculiar in many cases of socage tenure, and the feudal rule of primogeniture was not generally enforced.
Demesne of the crown, or royal demesne, was that part of the crown lands not granted out to feudal tenants, but which remained under the management of stewards appointed by the crown.
Depicting feudalism in the vivid colours of an age at war with feudal institutions, breathing into antique histories the breath of actual life, embracing the romance of Italy and Spain, the mysteries of German legend, the fictions of poetic fancy and the facts of daily life, humours of the moment and abstractions of philosophical speculation, in one homogeneous amalgam instinct with intense vitality, this extraordinary birth of time, with Shakespeare for the master of all ages, left a monument of the Re- naissance unrivalled for pure creative power by any other product of that epoch.
Dividing what the irreconcilables of the Hildebrandine party considered as an indissoluble whole, they made a sharp distinction between the property of the Church and the Church itself, between the political and territorial power of the bishops and their religious authority, and between the feudal investiture which confers lands and jurisdiction and the spiritual investiture which confers ecclesiastical rights.
Down to the end of this era painting was entirely in the hands of a patrician castecourtiers, priests, feudal nobles and their military retainers, all men of high education and gentle birth, living in a polished circle.
Down to this moment Williams position had been somewhat precarious; with the Norman war generally on hand, feudal rebellion always imminent, and Scottish invasions occasionally to be repelled, he had no easy life.
During the Crusades vast armies were set on foot in which feudal rights s Stubbs, Const.
During the loth, 11th and 12th centuries the Church had been organized on the lines of the prevailing feudal system - the bishops and abbots were feudal barons, and the effects of the system were felt throughout the ranks of the lower clergy.
During the month of January conferences were held at Vienna, with Taaffe in the chair, to which were invited representatives of the three groups into which the Bohemian representatives were divided, the German party, the Czechs, and the Feudal party.
During the rule of the nobles and the mixed rule of nobles and popolani the commune of Siena was enlarged by fortunate acquisitions of neighbouring lands and by the submission of feudal lords, such as the Scialenghi, Aldobrandeschi, Pannocchieschi, Visconti di Campiglia, &c.
During those fifteen years the kingdom of Jerusalem was agitated by a struggle between the native barons, championing the principle that sovereignty resided in the collective baronage, and taking their stand on the assizes, and Frederick II., claiming sovereignty for himself, and opposing to the assizes the feudal law of Sicily.
Each of the territories was a separate political unit with a separate history, and some of them had a historic claim to a large amount of selfgovernment; in many the old feudal estates had survived till 1848.
Education, trade, religious toleration, the emancipation of the agricultural population from feudal burdens - all had her approval up to a certain point.
Edward was determined to exact all the ordinary feudal rights of an overlordwhatever might have been the former relations of the English and Scottishcrowns.
Even a certain number of the monastic establishments came in this way into the possession of the feudal landowners, who nominated abbots and abbesses as they appointed the incumbents of their churches.
Even in feudal times suzerainty might be merely nominal, an instance in point being the suzerainty or over-lordship of the papacy over Naples.
Even when, in the 13th century, the ranks of the feudal hierarchy in France came to be more definitely fixed, the style of "count" might imply much, or comparatively little.
Every feudal court and castle was in fact a school of chivalry, and although princes and great personages were rarely actually pages or squires, the moral and physical discipline through which they passed was not in any important particular different from that to which less exalted candidates for knighthood were subjected.'
Every man, as Wycliffe taughtusing the feudal analogies of contemporary societyis Gods tenant-inchief, directly responsible for his acts to his overlord; the pope is always thrusting himself in between, like a mesne-tenant, and destroying the touch between God and man by his interference.
Every manor composing these great fiefs was likely to be affected by the policy or the character of the administration of the feudal lord, and he, again, by the policy or the difficulties, the strength or the weakness, of the central government.
Every petty Italian prince, from the pope downwards, created them for love or money; and, in the absence of any regulating authority, the title was also widely and loosely assumed, while often the feudal title passed with the sale of the estate to which it was attached.
Exemption was obtained from these incidences of feudalism by large payments to the Crown in return for charters covenanting that Malta should for ever be administered under the royal exchequer without the intervention of intermediary feudal lords.
Feudal castles and medieval towns now crown its banks, notably, Freudenberg and Miltenberg.
Feudal history was always a becoming, always a gradual passing from one stage to another, so long as feudalism continued to form the main organization of society.
Feudal in origin, Dunster's later importance was commercial, and the port had a considerable wool, corn and cattle trade with Ireland.
Feudal law required that the king should take seisin of the earldom before regranting it and receiving the homage, and the sheriff of Ayr was directed to take it on Baliol's behalf.
Feudal masters could not afford to act with the ruthless cruelty of slaveholders relying on government and civilization to back their claims to a complete sway over their human chattels.
Feudal service was more and more compounded for by a money payment, while additional taxes were raised, all going to pay the mercenaries with whom he fought Richard I.
Finding, as he said, that the liberality of former kings had left the Crown " no estates except the high roads of Portugal," he determined to crush the feudal nobility and seize its territories.
Flanders in the feudal period was a fief of the king of France - the count of Flanders being the first of the twelve peers of France; but there was a small strip extending from Alost to the isles of Zeeland, designated Imperial Flanders, of which the count was the vassal of the Holy Roman emperor.
For 88 turbulent years this feudal kingdom was imposed on the country, and then it disappeared as suddenly as it came, leaving no trace but the ruins of castles and churches, a few place-names, and an undying hereditary hatred of Christianity among the native population.
For a hundred years the great feudal lords had disposed of the crown as they pleased, handing it back an.d forward from one dynasty to another.
For the next two centuries and a half the lands west of Dee and Wye were divided between the new counties, forming the principality of Wales, and the marches where the old feudal franchises continued, till the marcher-lordships gradually fell by forfeiture or marriage to the crown.
For the Ruthenians, elated by their victory, refused to return to work, and demanded the abolition of all feudal obligations as the reward of their loyalty.
For three hours the professional regiments of all sorts in the French lines rivalled one another in enduring the fire unmoved, the forerunners of the military systems of to-day, landsknechts, Picardie and Piedmont, showing the feudal gendarmerie that they too were men of honour.
Fought between the retainers of William, Lord Berkeley, son of James, and those who followed Thomas Talbot, Viscount Lisle, grandson of the illustrious Talbot and great-grandson of the countess of Warwick, this was the last private battle on English ground between two feudal lords.
Frankish law becomes a powerful modifying element in English legal history after the Conquest, when it was introduced wholesale in royal and in feudal courts.
Frequently did great lay lords, as in this case, hold lands by feudal tenure of ecclesiastics.
From that moment the ducal power gained strength in Brittany and succeeded in curbing the feudal nobles.
Furia, in feudal law, was the right granted to tenants having major jurisdiction to erect a gallows within the limits of their fief.
Gilbert's Viceroys of Ireland (Dublin, 1865) gives a connected view of the feudal establishment to the accession of Henry VIII.
Gradually feudal customs asserted themselves.
Great diversity prevailed everywhere, and we should not be surprised to find some different fact or custom in every lordship. Anglo-Norman feudalism attained a logical completeness and a uniformity of practice which, in the feudal age proper, can hardly be found elsewhere through so large a territory; but in Anglo-Norman feudalism the exception holds perhaps as large a place as the regular, and the uniformity itself was due to the most serious of exceptions from the feudal point of view - centralization under a powerful monarchy.
Guy ruled from 1192 till his death in 1194; his brother Amaury took the title of king, and from this time Cyprus was governed for nearly three centuries by a succession of kings of the same dynasty, who introduced into the island the feudal system and other institutions of western Europe.
Haidar Shehab, third of the line, inflicted a notable defeat on the pasha of Saida (capital of an Ottoman eyalet since 1688) and the Yemenite Druses at Ain Dara, near Zahleh, in 1711, and proceeded to consolidate Shehab power, breaking up the old feudal society and substituting for the sheikhs mukatajis (tax-contractors), who had penal jurisdiction.
Hating as he did feudal class institutions and Tudor-Stuart traditions of arbitrary rule, 2 his attitude can be imagined toward Hamilton's oft-avowed partialities - and Jefferson assumed, his intrigues - for British class-government with its eighteenth-century measure of corruption.
He adopted the new ideas, and in a pamphlet entitled Le Bon Sens attacked feudal privileges; he also submitted to the Constituent Assembly a scheme for the reorganization of the navy, but it was not accepted.
He entered parliament in 1872 as a liberal Catholic, attaching himself at first to the Deal party; but the feudal and ultramontane traditions of his family circle profoundly modified, though they could never destroy, his popular ideals.
He exploited also the townspeoples need for security and the instinct of independence which made them claim a definite place in the feudal hierarchy.
He forced the clergy to pay long-neglected feudal dues, and intrigued against the great houses of Anjou and Orleans in Italy.
He gathered by degrees around him "a kind of feudal clan of servants and retainers," and he plunged, with more generous ardour than coolness of judgment, into the troubled politics of the country.
He had been designed by his parents for the military profession, but the new light which now broke in upon him determined him to devote his entire energies to the abolition of the existing feudal system and to the establishment of a constitutional government.
He had received from his father the smatterings of a liberal education, but until the outbreak of the Revolution he was a domestic servant, and from 1785 occupied the invidious office of cornmissaire a terrier, his function being to assist the nobles and priests in the assertion of their feudal rights as against the unfortunate peasants.
He imroved the laws and institutions established by p i his predecessors and adapted them to the require ments of the age; to him are due important modifications in the feudal system, aimed.
He is directly responsible for the beginnings of the feudal anarchy which wellnigh led to the extinction of the monarchy at the end of the 13th century.
He led the shire-levies, collected the royal revenues both feudal and non-feudal, and presided in the shire-court as judge, till in the course of years his functions in that sphere were gradually taken over by the itinerant justices.
He left the great lords, such as William des Roches, in full possession of their feudal power.
He not only left the constitution intact, but he dismissed Manteuffels feudal ministry and replaced it with moderate Liberals.
He reformed and improved the administration of the country both civil and military, inaugurated a new and improved system for the feudal tenures of limitary fiefs, and his amelioration of the lot of his Christian subjects is not his least title to fame.
He seems to have regarded them as a kind of garrison against feudal unruliness, while the rents they furnished increased his financial resources.
He submitted to the yoke of the social system and feudal institutions at the very moment when he was attempting to revive royal authority; he was ruler of the state, but ruler of vassals also.
He summoned John to appear before him as suzerain, to answer the complaints of his Poitevin snbjects, and when he failed to plead declared war on him and declared his dominions escheated to the French crown for non-fulfilment of his Pht feudal allegiance.
He then spent a year in the study of feudal and civil law before he resolved to devote himself to theology.
He was ever ready to act, either personally or through his delegates, and never ceased to be the effective leader of all the feudal soldiers he enrolled under the banner of the Holy See.
He was not a feudal lord nor a local sheriff, for any franklin could change his g060r5 when he would, and the rights of "judgment by peers" were in full use; moreover, the office could be bequeathed, sold, divided or pledged by the possessor; still the goc51 had considerable power as long as the commonwealth lasted.
He was opposed by the legate Pandulf (1218-1221), who claimed the guardianship of the kingdom for the Holy See; by the Poitevin Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, who was the young king's tutor; by the foreign mercenaries of John, among whom Falkes de Breaute took the lead; and by the feudal party under the earls of Chester and Albemarle.
He was successful at the council of 1059, the pontifical election was placed out of reach of the schemes of the local feudal lords and restored to the heads of the clergy; certain reservations were made with regard to those rights which the Holy See was considered to have conceded personally to Henry of Germany (the young king Henry IV., son of the emperor Henry III.), but nothing more.
He was unable to check the disaffection of the feudal aristocracy, who combined with an officer named Isaac Comnenus to depose him.
He was, moreover, almost the last relic of the great feudal aristocracy of the Conquest."
Hence, between hills crowned by frequent feudal castles, it runs by Wimpfen and by Hornberg, where Gdtz von Berlichingen lived, to Eberbach, where it enters the sandstone formation of the Odenwald.
Henry at once issued a proclamation and charter promising the redress of all the grievances with which his brother had afflicted his feudal tenants, the clergy and the whole nation.
Her agents are said to have shown great harshness in collecting the feudal dues with which to supply her large household.
Here, if anywhere, it seemed as though the ecclesiastical and feudal fetters of the middle ages might be broken, and humanity might enter on a new stage of joyous unimpeded evolution.
His chief administrative reforms were designed to secure centralized government and to limit the jurisdiction of feudal courts.
His chosen instrument, a clerical lawyer named Ranuif Flambard (q.v.), whom he presently made bishop of Durham, was shameless in his methods of twisting feudal or national law to the detriment of the taxpayer.
His feudal domain in Germany covers an area of over 1100 sq.
His opinions were conditioned by the French Revolution and by the feudal and military system still prevalent in France.
His policy seemed tame and cautious, but was entirely justifiable, for within a few months of Roberts departure the inevitable feudal rebellion broke out.
Holding respectively the great earidoms of West Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria, they reigned almost like petty sovereigns in their domains, and there seemed some chance that England might fall apart into semi-independent feudal states, just as France had done in the preceding century.
Homage was done not only by the vassal to whom feudal lands were first granted but by every one in turn by whom they were inherited, since they were not granted absolutely but only on condition of military and other service.
If his successor had been like him, feudal anarchy might have become as permanent in England as in Poland.
In 1125 Fiesole was sacked and destroyed, but the feudal nobles of, the contado (surrounding country), protected by the imperial margraves, were still powerful.
In 1204 Constantinople was captured by the Latins of the Fourth Crusade, and Baldwin of Flanders was crowned emperor; the Venetians acquired several maritime towns and islands, and Frankish feudal dynasties were established in Salonica, Athens, Achaea and elsewhere.
In 1257 the twelve peers were the chiefs of the great feudal provinces, the dukes of Normandy, Burgundy and Aquitaine, the counts of Toulouse, Champagne and Flanders, and six spiritual peers, the archbishop of Reims, the bishops of Laon, Chalons-sur-Marne, Beauvais, Langres and Noyon.
In 1333, William de Burgh, the young earl of Ulster, was murdered by the Mandevilles and others; in this case signal vengeance was taken, but the feudal dominion never recovered the blow, and on the north-east coast the English laws and language were soon confined to Drogheda and Dundalk.
In 1366 Edward formally repudiated the feudal supremacy over England, still claimed by the papacy by reason of John's submission.
In 1480 Boffille married Marie d'Albret, sister of Alain the Great, thus confirming the feudal position which the king had given him in the south.
In 1639 he procured for his province a royal charter modelled after that of Maryland, which invested him with the feudal tenure of a county palatine and vice-regal powers of government.
In 1789 he drew up the first article of the cahier of the electors of the bailliage of Roye, demanding the abolition of feudal rights.
In 1817, by the treaty of Poona, the British government acquired from the peshwa all his rights, interests and pretensions, feudal, territorial or pecuniary, in Bundelkhand.
In 1819, however, this feudal relic was supplanted by a new constitution.
In 828, when Mamflns brother Motasim was feudal lord, a violent insurrection broke out in the IJauf, occasioned, as usual, by excessive taxation; it was partly quelled in the next year by Motalim, who marched against the rebels with an army of 4000 Turks.
In an age when, with the evolution of the feudal organization cf society, even everyday costume was becoming a uniform, symbolizing in material and colour the exact status of the wearer, it was natural that in the parallel organization of the Church the official vestments should undergo a similar process of differentiation and definition.
In Catalonia and Valencia the "germanias" were combinations of the peasantry to resist the exactions of the feudal lords.
In due time the city populations, free from the feudal yoke, and safe within the walls which in many instances the bishops had built for them, became impatient also of the bishop's government.
In early times the feudal lords were themselves the chief priests of the local temples.
In every feudal country, however, something of the earlier conception survived.
In feudal law the term is applied to the practice of a freeman placing himself under the protection of a lord (see Feudalism), and in ecclesiastical law to the granting of benefices in commendam.
In feudal subordination to him a royal count, who was also Vogt (advocatus) of the cathedral church of St Martin, had his seat at Utrecht as the chief town of the Gouw (Gau, pagus) of Ifterlake.
In Germany at the same period the feudal system debarred the Jews from holding land, and though there was as yet no material persecution they suffered moral injury by being driven exclusively into finance and trade.
In his country retreat at Shizuoka he formed one of the richest libraries ever brought together in Japan, and by will he bequeathed the Japanese section of it to his eighth son, the feudal chief of Owari, and the Chinese section to his ninth son, the prince of Kishu, with the result that under the former feudatorys auspices two works of considerable merit were produced treating of ancient ceremonials and supplementing the Nikongi.
In imitation of the practice observed under the Roman empire, the term came to be applied under the feudal system to portions of land granted by a lord to his vassal for the maintenance of the latter on condition of his rendering military service; and such grants were originally for life only, and the land reverted to the lord on the death of the vassal.
In Ireland the land nominally belonged to the tribe, but in reality a kind of feudal system existed.
In Ireland there were no cities and no municipal institutions; the nation consisted of groups of tribes connected by kinship, and loosely held together by a feudal system which we shall examine later.
In its origin a revolt against feudal oppression, it became, under the leadership of Munzer, a war against all constituted authorities, and an attempt to establish by force his ideal Christian commonwealth, with absolute equality and the community of goods.
In June the great popular festival "Dei Quattro Altari" is annually celebrated here in commemoration of the abolition of the feudal dominion in 1700.
In later times royal persons and great feudal magnates frequently kept menageries of wild animals, aviaries and aquaria, and it is from these that modern public Gardens have taken their origin.
In many districts, especially in Mecklenburg and some of the Prussian provinces, the old feudal jurisdiction of the manorial courts survived.
In many points of detail the vassal's services differed widely in different parts of the feudal world.
In March 1291 he ordered search to be made for documents bearing on his claims in the English clerical libraries, and summoned his northern feudal levies to meet him at Norham on Tweed, fully armed, in June.
In Naples he fomented a conspiracy among the feudal lords, who were discontented with the centralized government established under the auspices of Frederick's chancellor, Piero della Vigna.
In no country is there such a clear grouping of the towns on geographical lines as in France, these geographical lines, of course, having in the first instance been drawn by historical causes Another feature is the extent to which, in the unruly times preceding the civic movement, serfdom had spread among the inhabitants even of the towns throughout the greater part of the country, and the application of feudal ideas to town government.
In opposition, however, to the feudal and military system, the former aspect of which had been strengthened by the restoration, he advocated an arrangement by which the industrial chiefs should control society.
In order to hold these possessions, she borrowed from the Franks the feudal system, and granted fiefs in the Greek islands to her more powerful families, on condition that they held the trade route open for her.
In process of time the rights originating in royal grants of privilege overbalanced, as it were, folk-right in many respects, and became themselves the starting-point of a new legal system - the feudal one.
In return for these privileges the lord was liable to forfeit his rights if he neglected to protect and defend the tenant or did anything injurious to the feudal relation.
In Rum the feudal system was extended to Christian princes, who were acknowledged by the sultan on condition of paying tribute and serving in the armies.
In Sicily, however, Charles's government soon made itself odious by its exactions, the insolence and cruelty of the king's French officials and favourites, the depreciation of the currency, and the oppressive personal services, while the nobles were incensed at the violation of their feudal constitution.
In Sigismund's reign the feudal system, for the first time, became deeply rooted in Magyar soil, and it is a lamentable fact that in 15th-century Hungary it is to be seen at its very worst, especially in those wild tracts, and they were many, in which the king's writ could hardly be said to run.
In the 14th century this social arrangement, based primarily on natural economy and on the feudal disruption of society, began to give way.
In the case of the Western Alps (minus the bit from the chain of Mont Blanc to the Simplon, which followed the fortunes of the Valais), a prolonged struggle for the Alpine region took place between the feudal lords of Savoy, the Dauphine and Provence.
In the early middle ages the term was applied to representatives of a count administering justice for him in the country or small towns and dealing with unimportant cases, levying taxes, &c. Monasteries and religious houses often employed a vicar to answer to their feudal lords for those of their lands which did not pass into mortmain.
In the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) the theory was applied to show how the industrial revolution had replaced feudal with modern conditions.
In the first place, the Crusades represent the attempt of a feudal system, bound under the law of primogeniture to dispose of its younger sons.
In the first years of the reign of Charles VIII., Louis made a determined stand against the government of the Beaujeus, stirred up coalitions of the feudal nobles against them, and was finally defeated and taken prisoner at St Aubin du Cormier in 1488.
In the former treatise we have a clear and minute description of the rural practices of that period, and from the latter may be learned a good deal of the economy of the feudal system in its decline.
In the middle ages the question was often mooted whether states subject to feudal superiors, or the states forming the empire, were sovereign.
In the new constitution clauses were inserted abolishing feudal tenures and limiting future leases of agricultural land to a period of twelve years.
In the reign of Edward I., whose warlike enterprises after he was king were confined within the four seas, this alteration does not seem to have proceeded very far, and Scotland and Wales were subjugated by what was in the main, if not exclusively, a feudal militia raised as of old by writ to the earls and barons and the sheriffs.'
In these two ways then the feudal system was formed, and took possession of the state territorially, and of its functions in government.
In this concordat a distinction was made between spiritual investiture, by the ring and pastoral staff, and lay or feudal investiture, by the sceptre.
In this manner the feudal tenure of land began to prevail in almost all parts of Germany, and the elaborate social system which became known as feudalism was gradually built up. The dukes became virtually independent, and when Louis the Child died in 911, the royal authority existed in name only.
In this sense, therefore, England was turned into a feudal state by the results of the work of William the Conqueror.
In this way the feudal county, or duchy, formed itself, corresponding in most cases only roughly to the old administrative divisions of the state, for within the bounds of the county there had often formed private feudal possessions too powerful to be forced into dependence upon the count, sometimes the vice-comes had followed the count's example, and often, on the other hand, the count had attached to his county like private possessions of his own lying outside its boundaries.
In this way the south of Italy, together with the adjacent island of Sicily, was converted into one political body, which, owing to the peculiar temper of its Norman rulers and their powerful organization, assumed a more feudal character than any other part of the peninsula.
In view of the.great difference in the legal position of the free man and of the villein in feudal common law, it became very important to define the exact nature of the conditions on which the status of a villein depended.
It continued to exist under the name Cencelle as a feudal castle until the r 5th century.
It could, therefore, hold no prominent place in a condition of society which hardly recognized the state, as distinct from the members of the community, united by feudal ties.
It Feudelism is of course untrue to sayas was so often done by early historiansthat he introduced the feudal system into England.
It had to wait two centuries after the revolution of 987 before it was strong enough to take up the dormant tradition of an authority like that of Rome; and until then it cunningly avoided unequal strife in which, victory being impossible, reverses might have weakened those titles, higher than any due to feudal rights, conferred by the heritage of the Caesars and the coronation at Reims, and held in reserve for the future.
It is at this Ghibel- time that the people of Florence first began to acquire influence, and while the countess presided at the courts of justice in the name of the Empire, she was assisted by a group of great feudal nobles, judges, lawyers, &c., who formed, as elsewhere in Tuscany, the boni homines or sapientes.
It is clear, however, that the Chinese came from the west, and entered their present territory along the course of the Hwang-ho at an unknown period, possibly about 3000 B.C. In early historical times China consisted of a shifting confederacy of feudal states, but about 220 B.C. the state of Tsin or Chin (whence the name China) came into prominence, and succeeded in forming a homogeneous empire, which advanced considerably towards the south.
It is now possible perhaps to get some idea of the way in which the government of a feudal country was operated.
It is only in certain backward parts of Europe that the terms feudal and baronage in any technical sense can be used of the nobility of the 15th century.
It is romantically situated in the deep and winding valley of the Mosel, at the foot of a hill surrounded by a feudal castle dating from 1051, which has been restored in its former style.
It is thus not only a general word for a prince or sovereign, but also the common word for a feudal superior, and particularly of a feudal tenant holding directly of the king, a baron (q.v.), hence a peer of the realm, a member of the House of Lords, constituted of the lords temporal and the lords spiritual; this is the chief modern usage.
It left Europe bristling with feudal castles, and already alert for the march of progress.
It may be regarded in the first place as a mode or variety of feudal tenure, in the second place as a personal attribute or dignity, and in the third place as a scheme of manners or social arrangements.
It must be added, however, that even in the darkest times of feudal sway, economic forces provided some protection for the peasants who had lost the means of appealing to legal remedies.
It retained longer than the sister islands traces of feudal influence exerted by the landed proprietors, but has been gradually becoming more democratic. Under the Venetians it was divided into eight districts, and an elaborate system of police was in force; since its annexation to Greece it has been broken up into twenty demarchies, each with its separate jurisdiction and revenues, and the police system has been abolished.
It seems certain that the drafters of the charter were honest in their intentions, and did not purpose to set up a feudal oligarchy in the place of a royal autocracy.
It was a period of religious revival, and of reaction against abuses that followed in the wake of the feudal system; and this religious movement was informed by a new mysticism - a mysticism that fixed its attention mainly on the humanity of Christ and found its practical expression in the imitation of His life.
It was captured in 12 11 by Godfrey Villehardouin with the help of Venetian ships; a French dynasty ruled in it for some time, and established the feudal system in the country.
It was coincident with the building-out of the feudal system.
It was entangled also in the political strife of the feudal ages and of the beginning of modern empires.
It was from the precarium, or ecclesiastical benefice, that the feudal fief originated.
It was held in feudal tenure from the patriarch of Aquileia by the bishop of Pola, and afterwards, in 1139, by the counts of Duino, who retained it till the end of the 14th century.
It was necessary for the future development of England that its governmental system should be centralized and unified, that the authority of the monarchy should be more firmly extended over Wales and the western and northern borders, and that the still existing feudal franchises should be crushed; and these objects were worth the price paid in the methods of the Star Chamber and of the Councils of the North and of Wales.
It was often the policy of kings to increase the social privileges and legal exemptions of the nobility while taking away all political power, so that it is necessary in the history of institutions to distinguish sharply between these nobilities and the feudal baronage proper.
It was perpetuated from a savage past in the custom of cutting off the right hand of a man who died without heir, and sending it as proof of main-morte to the feudal lord.
It was rare in feudal times in England.
It was rather, if some explanation must be found for it, a strife between the kingly power and feudal anarchy.
It was the latter which gave rise to the feudal aristocracy which we see appearing under the Carolingians.
It was they who had to see that the shire court, and in minor affairs the hundred court, did not allow cases to slip away into the jurisdiction of the feudal courts of the baronage.
It was very acceptable to the baronage, who had suffered, on a smaller scale, the same grievance as the king, for when their subtenants transferred estates to the church, they (like their masters) suffered a permanent loss of feudal revenue.
It would then have produced a system which would have been feudal, in the wide sense of the term, but it would have been marked by different characteristics, it would have operated in a somewhat different way.
Its large square keep of the 14th century is the chief survival of feudal times.
Its manufacture dates from the close of the 17th Kutanl century, when the feudal chief of Kaga took the industry under his patronage.
James' attempt to obtain further supplies from the Commons by opening a bargain for the surrender of some of his old feudal prerogatives, such as wardship and marriage, which had no longer any real meaning except as a means of obtaining money in an oppressive way, broke down, and early in 1611 he dissolved his first parliament in anger.
John seized the opportunity to consolidate Coaiftion against Philip a European coalition, which included against most of the feudal lords in Flanders, Belgium and Philip Lorraine, and the emperor Otto IV.
Joint deliberation would ensure a majority to the reformers and therefore the abolition of privileges and the extinction of feudal rights of property.
Kdrber' s successor, Clam-Martinitz,' who belonged to the violently Czech feudal nobility, tried to form a national coalition Cabinet, including two German politicians.
King Edward insisted that by common feudal usage it was perfectly regular, and announced his intention of permitting it.
Knox would have resisted, though the arrest was by his feudal superior, Lord Bothwell; but Wishart himself commanded his submission, with the words "One is sufficient for a sacrifice," and was handed over for trial at St Andrews.
Later Count Beust, leader of the Austrian and feudal party in Saxony, became his principal minister and guided his policy on most occasions.
Later it was modified by the rise of the feudal system and the re-establishment of the modern European nationalities (see Church History).
Meanwhile France had been learning something even in its feudal anarchy.
Merlin, under suzerainete, shows that the word was not used by all feudal writers in the same sense.
Military service and the paying of the feudal taxesaids, reliefs, &care incidents of the bargain between the crown and the grantee to whom land has been given.
Mitsuhisa, then feudal lord of Satsuma, was a munificent patron of art.
Most of the great feudal lords followed the king's example, but their concessions varied considerably, and in the south of France some of the bishops were still doing homage for their sees until the closing years of the 13th century; but long before then the right of investing with ring and crozier had disappeared from every part of France.
Much more memorable, however, was a library formed by Iyeyasus grandson the feudal chief of Mito (1662I 700), who not only collected a vast quantity of books hitherto scattered among Shinto and Buddhist monasteries and private houses, but also employed a number of scholars to compile a history unprecedented in magnitude, the Dai-Nihon-shi.
No authority was more weighty or more respected than that of this feudal lord of Gaul, Italy and Germaiiy; none was more transient, because it was so purely personal.
No feudal revolt of importance therefore troubled Roger.
Nor is it in the sphere of taxation alone that Williams organization of the realm stands on the old English customs. In the military sphere, though his normal army is the feudal force composed of the tenants-in-chief and the knights whom they have enfeoffed, he retains the power to call out the fyrd, the old national levee en masse, without regard to whether its members are freemen or villeins of some lord.
Nor was the feudal system established in any sense by the settlement of the comitatus group on the conquered land.
Not only the royal court, but every feudal court had its historiographers and musicians.
Not until the Tokugawa family obtained military control of the whole empire (I6o3), and, fixing its capital at Yedo, required the feudal chiefs to reside there every second year, did the problem of roads and post-stations force itself once more on official attention.
Of a headstrong temperament, Saisset as abbot energetically sustained the struggle with the counts of Foix, begun two centuries before, for the lordship of the city of Pamiers, which had been shared between the counts and abbots by the feudal contract of pariage.
Of the feudal courts there were some twenty-two.
On behalf of the committee appointed to deal with feudal rights, he presented to the Convention reports on the seignorial rights which were subject to compensation, on hunting and fishing rights, forestry, and kindred subjects.
On the 13th of April 1846 an imperial decree abolished some of the more burdensome feudal obligations; but this concession was greeted with so fierce an outcry, as an authoritative endorsement of the atrocities, that it was again revoked, and Count Franz von Stadion was sent to restore order in Galicia.
On the completion of the feudal revolution of 1868 he was appointed governor of the province of Tosa, and having served six years in this office, was transferred to Tokyo as assistant minister of finance.
On the Continent, however, there are several recorded examples of bannerets who had an hereditary claim to that honour and its attendant privileges on the ground of the nature of their feudal tenure.'
On the continentthe main effect of the viking invasions was to dash the empire of Charles the Great into fragments, and to aid in producing the numberless petty states of feudal Europe.
On the contrary, the Renaissance was rather the last stage of the middle ages, emerging from ecclesiastical and feudal despotism, developing what was original in medieval ideas by the light of classic arts and letters, holding in itself the promise of the modern world.
On the morrow of the marriage Louis, afterwards Louis VIII., seized Aire and St Omer in right of his mother, Isabella, and on this account Ferdinand refused his feudal duty in the English expedition.
On the northern shores of this strait stretched the feudal state ruled over by Prince Choshu, who refused to recognize the clause opening the strait, and erected batteries on the shore, from which he opened fire on all ships which attempted to force the passage.
Or else it might be a province forming part of feudal France, which before the annexation had had a superior jurisdiction from which the Crown had endeavoured to institute an appeal to the Parlement of Paris, but for which after the annexation it was no longer necessary to maintain this appeal, so that the province might now be given a supreme court, a parlement.
Organized upon a sort of military and feudal basis, they soon became a terror to all their neighbours, marching east into Sikkim, west into Kumaon, and south into the Gangetic plains.
Other deputies rose to demand the repeal of the game laws, the enfranchisement of such serfs as were still to be found in France, and the abolition of tithes and of feudal courts and to renounce all privileges, whether of classes, of cities, or of provinces.
Others deal with the great institutional features of medieval society - the development of the feudal system, of the ecclesiastical system, and of the free political system of England.
Owing to the influx caused by the periodical visits of the daimyos (feudal lords) with their numerous attendants, it probably exceeded qmillion during the early part of the 19th century.
Palaeologus, but most of the feudal Latin states continued to exist till the Turkish conquest; the Venetians retained their possessions for several centuries later and waged continual wars with the Turks.
Parliament was dissolved in the summer, and Taaffe, by private negotiations, first of all persuaded the Bohemian feudal proprietors to give the Feudalists, who had long been excluded, a certain number of seats; secondly, he succeeded where Potocki had failed, and came to an agreement with the Czechs; they had already, in 1878, taken their seats in the diet at Prague, and now gave up the policy of " passive resistance," and consented to take their seats also in the parliament at Vienna.
Parliamentary institutions of a feudal type had long existed in the island, and Lord William Bentinck, the British minister, insisted on a reform of the constitution on English and French lines.
Perhaps the most noteworthy event of the second portion of the Conquerors reign was a rebellion which, though it made no head and was easily suppressed, marks the commencement of that feudal danger which was to be the constant trouble of the English kings for the next three generations.
Philip Augustus was not satisfied with the destruction of a turbulent feudalism; he wished to substitute for it such unity and peace as had obtained in the Roman Empire; Adminisand just as he had established his supremacy over the tration of feudal lords, so now he managed to extend it over the Philip clergy, and to bend them to his will.
Philip supported the clergy against the feudal lords, and in many cases against the burgesses of the towns, but rigidly exacted from them the performance of their secular duties, ironically promising to aid the clergy of Reims, who had failed to do so, "with his prayers only" against the violence of the lords of Rethel and Roucy.
Philip thus set the feudal lords one against the other; and against them all, first the Church, then the communes.
Probably the ceremony which grew into feudal homage, and the oath of fealty, certainly the honourable position of the vassal and his pride in the relationship, the strong tie which bound lord and man together, and the idea that faith and service were due on both sides in equal measure, we may trace to German sources.
Referring the collapse of the empire to the retention of feudal forms and to the action of religious animosities, Hegel looked forward to reorganization by a central power (Austria) wielding the imperial army, and by a representative body elected by the geographical districts of the empire.
Regarded as a method of military organization, the feudal system of tenures was always far better adapted to the purposes of defensive than of offensive warfare.
Regulations were now stricti enforced, fixing the number of horses and carriers available at eac station, the loads to be carried by them and their charges, as well as the transport services that each feudal chief was entitled to demand and the fees he had to pay in return.
Rotterdam probably owes its existence to two castles, which existed in feudal times.
Scholars are not yet agreed as to what would have been their result if their natural development had not been cut off by the violent introduction of Frankish feudalism with the Norman conquest, whether the historical feudal system, or a feudal system in the general sense.
Similar conditions have produced an organization which may be called feudal, in various countries, and in widely separated periods of history.
Similarly, when it abolished feudal tenures in France, it ignored the fact that the rights of certain German princes over lands in Alsace were guaranteed by the treaties of Westphalia.
So long as the government remained dependent on the baron, it remained feudal in its character.
Some choice ware of the latter type was manufactured by him in Kish, by order of the feudal chief of that province.
Something like taxation occasionally occurred, though the government was usually sustained by the scanty feudal payments, by the proceeds of justice and by the income of domain manors.
St Anselm denied that any penalty was due to the devil, and in terms of feudal honour restated the problem.
Superficially, for example, the feudal court differed but little from its Teutonic predecessor.
Taaffe's bill, while keeping the curiae of the feudal proprietors and the chambers of commerce as they were, and making no change in the number of members, proposed to give the franchise in both towns and rural districts to every one who could read and write, and had resided six months in one place.
That the Pilgrims' Progress should thus have turned into a Holy War is a fact readily explicable, when we turn to consider the attempts made by the Church, during the 11th century, to purify, or at any rate to direct, the feudal instinct for private war (Fehde).
The abolition of hereditable jurisdictions and of the claims of feudal superiors to military service, after Culloden, broke the bond between chiefs and clans, and introduced new social and economical conditions, bequeathing the Land Question to the 10th century.
The abolition of Th feudal tenures and purveyance had long been decommons manded, and the conclusion of an arrangement which aim at had been mooted in the reign of James 1.
The Armenians in the south-east of Asia Minor borrowed feudal institutions from the Franks and the feudal vocabulary itself.
The Babylonian king remained a priest to the last, under the control of a powerful hierarchy; the Assyrian king was the autocratic general of an army, at whose side stood in early days a feudal nobility, and from the reign of Tiglath-pileser III.
The barons expressed their wish for a peace with France, and when summoned to produce their feudal contingents pleaded poverty, and raised a rather shallow theory to the effect that their services could not be asked for wars beyond seasagainst which there were conclusive precedents in the reigns of Henry I.
The beginnings of the history of this feudal state (the later Holland) centre round the abbey of Egmont in whose archives 1.
The bitter and well-balanced rivalry between the nobles and the people, and the endless danger to which it exposed the city 'owing to the fact that the nobles were always ready to claim the protection of their feudal chief, the emperor, brought to the front two noble families as protagonists of the contending factions - the Torriani of Valsassina, and the Visconti, who derived their name from the office of delegates which they had held under the archbishops.
The choice of the pope was then subject to the pleasure of the sovereign of Germany, against whom the Roman feudal lords, devoted as they were to the old abuses, were in constant revolt.
The church itself gradually became grafted on to the feudal organization, the result of which was the peculiar system which we find in the 6th and 7th centuries.
The Church quite naturally shared in feudal land-holding; in addition to the tithes she possessed immense estates which had been given her by the faithful from early times, and for the defence of which she resorted to secular means.
The class to which Hutten and his friend, Franz von Sickingen, a daring and ambitious Rhenish baron, belonged, was that of the small feudal tenants in chief, the Ritterschaft or knights of the Empire.
The codes in their turn tended still further to harden these usages into fixed forms, and we may date from the end of the 13th century an age of feudal law regulating especially the holding and transfer of land, and much more uniform in character than the law of the feudal age proper.
The coinage had not only been seriously debased during the closing years of the Tokugawa regime, but large quantities of paper currency had been issued and circulated, both by many of the feudal lords, and by the central government itself, as a temporary expedient for filling an impoverished exchequer.
The connexion of the lesser lay abbots with the abbeys, especially in the south of France, lasted longer; and certain feudal families retained the title of abbes chevaliers (abbates milites) for centuries, together with certain rights over the abbey lands or revenues.
The cortes had grown obsolete; the feudal aristocracy were become courtiers.
The crown in England also abandoned investiture by the pastoral staff and ring, but, more fortunate than in France, retained the right of receiving feudal homage from the episcopate.
The danger of feudal rebellion was not yet past, as was to be shown ten years later.
The death of every bishop was always the signal for violent disputes among the neighbouring feudal states, each of them intriguing to secure the election of its own candidate; but, as stated above, Brabant and Gelderland had at last to recognize the fact of the supremacy of Holland over the see.
The decision between the two races turned on the vote of the feudal proprietors, and in order to win this a society was formed among the German capitalists of Vienna (to which the name of Chabrus was popularly given) to acquire by real or fictitious purchase portions of those estates to which a vote was attached.
The defence of the country was next cared for by regulations for the arming of the whole nation, down to every one who owned the value of a cow, a measure far in advance of the old feudal levy.
The development of feudal society, of centralizing kingship and ultimately of a system of common law, brought about great changes which all hinge on the fundamental fact that the kings, while increasing the power of the state in other respects, surrendered it completely as regards the relations between the peasants and their lords.
The development of the feudal system of timars and ziamets and its extension to Europe was largely his work.
The disabilities under which a feudal owner very frequently lay gave rise to the practice of conveying land by other methods than that of feoffment with livery of seisin, that is, a handing over of the feudal possession.
The drberi szabalyzat (feudal prescription) of 1767 restored to the peasants the right of transmigration and, in some respects, protected them against the exactions of their landlords.
The duty of giving the lord advice was often demanded and fulfilled in sessions of the court, and in these feudal courts the obligations of lord and vassal were enforced, with an ultimate appeal to war.
The dynasty of Chow finally perished two centuries and a quarter after the death of the sage at the hands of the first historic emperor of the nation, - the first of the dynasty of Ts'in, who swept away the foundations of the feudal system.
The Eastern empire was abolished, and a feudal Latin empire erected in its stead.
The emperor, on the one hand, preserved feudal suzerainty over ecclesiastical benefices; but, on the other, he ceased to confer ring and crozier, and thereby not only lost the right of refusing the elect on the grounds of unworthiness, but also was deprived of an efficacious means of maintaining vacancies in ecclesiastical offices.
The empire of Romania was organized on feudal principles; the emperor was feudal superior of the princes who received portions of the conquered territory.
The Empire was the counterweight to the local tyrannies into which the local authorities established by the Empire itself, the feudal powers, judicial and military, necessary for the purposes of government, invariably tended to degenerate.
The example of the kings was followed by the feudal nobles, sometimes by making a temporary concession permanent, sometimes without any form of commendation whatever.
The farm lands were generally held at a rent from an overlord, who might according to times and circumstances be the king, a feudal prince, or a temple-corporation.
The feudal character of the first chamber was abolished, and its members made mainly elective from among the highest tax-payers, while an almost universal suffrage was introduced for the second chamber.
The feudal estates were replaced by two chambers, largely elective, and the privy council by a responsible ministry of six departments.
The feudal nobles had great power arising from their wealth, the great traditions of their families, and the connexion with the court, and by the electoral law they had a large number of representatives in the diet.
The feudal organization of both, the one under the house of Khazin, the other under those of Maan and Shehab successively, was in full force during the 17th and 18th centuries; and it was the break-up of this in the first part of the 10th century which produced the anarchy that culminated after 1840 in the civil war.
The feudal relation between the king and the princes and between the princes and their vassals had become purely nominal.
The feudal state was one in which, as it has been said, private law had usurped the place of public law.
The feudal system again was a system of offence and defence, and its object was efficiency for war, not the organized regulation of peace.
The feudal system had in fact turned against the throne, the vassals using it to secure a permanent hold upon offices and fiefs, and to get possession of estates and of power.
The feudal system that had subsisted for more than 1500 years had become old.
The feudal system with which history most concerns itself is that of medieval western Europe, and it is that which will be here described.
The first and third are still occupied by feudal chiefs, and have never been subjected to a regular land-settlement, by either the Mussulman or the British government.
The foundation of the feudal relationship proper was the fief, which was usually land, but might be any desirable thing, as an office, a revenue in money or kind, the right to collect a toll, or operate a mill.
The founder of a colony was styled a patroon, and, although the colonists were bound to him only by a voluntary contract for specified terms, the relations between them and the patroon during the continuance of the contract were in several important respects similar to those under the feudal system between the lord of a manor and his serfs.
The founder of the house of Savoy is Umberto Biancamano (Humbert the White-handed), a feudal lord of uncertain but probably Teutonic descent, who in 1003 was count of Salmourenc in the Viennois, in 1017 of Nyon on the Lake of Geneva, and in 1024 of the Val d'Aosta on the 4 eastern slope of the Western Alps.
The frequent convocations of military assemblies, far from testifying to political liberty, was simply a means of communicating the emperors commands to the various feudal groups.
The Fula portion of this province, held like the other Hausa states under a feudal system of large landowners or fief-holders, has been organized and assessed for taxation on the system accepted by the emirs throughout the protectorate, and the populations are working harmoniously under British rule.
The German feudal lords he pronounced hangmen, who knew only how to swindle the poor man - " such fellows were formerly called scoundrels, but now we must call them ` Christians and revered princes.'
The great landowners who were developing into feudal lords, and the smaller freemen who were becoming independent burghers, broke the imperial.
The Hirado porcelainso called because it enjoyed the specia patronage of Matsuura, feudal chief of Hiradowas produced al Mikawa-uchi-yama, but did not attain excellence until.
The history of Pomerania, as distinct from that of Pomerellen, consists mainly of an almost endless succession of divisions of territory among the different lines of the ducal house, and of numerous expansions and contractions of territory through constant hostilities with the elector of Brandenburg, who claimed to be the immediate feudal superior of Pomerania, and with other neighbouring rulers.
The incipient feudal baron had not been slow to take advantage of the break-down of the old German military system.
The independent position of the burgesses, who thus assumed a position of equality by the side of the feudal class, is one of the peculiarities of the kingdom of Jerusalem.
The insubordination of several great vassalsthe count of Vermandois, the duke of Burgundy, the count of Flanderswho treated him as he had treated the Carolingian king; the treachery of Arnuif, archbishop of Reims, who let himself be won over by the empress Theophano; the papal hostility inflamed by the emperor against the claim of feudal France to independence,all made it seem for a time as though the unity of the Roman empire of the West would be secured at Hughs expense and in Ottos favor; but as a matter of fact this papal and imperial hostility ended by making the Capet dynasty a national one.
The island was annexed by Great Britain in 1628 and was bestowed in 1680 upon the Codrington family who, for more than 200 years, held it as a kind of feudal fief.
The islands, though seldom visited by foreigners, are for the most part highly interesting and picturesque, notwithstanding their somewhat barren appearance when viewed from the sea; many of them bear traces of the feudal rule of Venetian families in the middle ages, and their inhabitants in general may be regarded as presenting the best type of the Greek race.
The kharaj, the jiziye, and the whole feudal system disappeared in theory, although its spirit, and indeed in some respects its practice, still exists in fact, during the reforming period initiated by Sultan Selim III., culminating in the Tanzimat-i-Khairiye (1839) of Abd-ul-Mejid, and the Hatt-iHumayun issued by the same sultan (1856).
The king " lived on his own," on rent of crown lands, feudal fines and aids, wardships, marriages, and the revenues of vacant bishoprics.
The king of Denmark, too, acknowledged Henry as his feudal lord.
The king replied by harrying him on charges of having failed in his feudal obligation to provide well-equipped knights for a Welsh expedition, and imposed ruinous fines on him.
The kingship formed the nucleus of new governments as the feudal system passed away.
The lands of the earl of Shrewsbury and other absentees, who had performed no duties, were resumed; and both Celtic and feudal nobles were encouraged to come to court.
The last demanded that the peasants should be freed from the payment to the state, which represented the purchase price for the remission of feudal burdens.
The lay abbot took his recognized rank in the feudal hierarchy, and was free to dispose of his fief as in the case of any other.
The local feudal nobles, however, seem to have put an end to this government by council, and a dictator (tagus) was appointed, with authority over the whole military force of the federation.
The lords of the different territories belonged to five orders of nobility, corresponding closely to the dukes, marquises, earls, counts and barons of feudal Europe.
The lordship (seigneurie) of Albret (Labrit, Lebret), situated in the Landes, gave its name to one of the most powerful feudal families of France in the middle ages.
The machinery of administration was out of date and complicated by the authority of feudal and ecclesiastical courts.
The maintenance of their rule was, therefore, only possible by the exercise of great political ability, the more so, since, as we have seen, they were not united among themselves, the clergy and Feudal party being opposed to the Liberals.
The monarchy, now dominant, and far wealthier than before, rested upon the support of the great nobles, many of whom held their lands by feudal tenure, and constituted the royal Raad, or council.
The more land the church acquired, the less feudal taxation came into the royal exchequer.
The most lucrative of the lord's rights were wardship and marriage, but the feudal theory of these also was non-economic. The fief fell into the hands of the lord, and he enjoyed its revenues during the minority of the heir, because the minor could not perform the duties by which it was held.
The Nabeshima porcelainso called because of its production at private factories under the special patronage of Nabeshima Naoshige, feudal chief of Hizenwas produced at Okawachiyama.
The native Normans were but a third part of his host, and he himself commanded rather as director of a great joint-stock venture than as the feudal chief of his own duchy.
The numerous townships which then sprang_up acquired rights of self-government according to German law, Breslau being refounded about 1250 as a German town, and a feudal organization was introduced among the landholding nobility.
The old courts of justice, whether royal or feudal, ceased to act.
The Old English origins of the tenure are still apparent even at this time in the shape of some of its incidents, especially in the absence of feudal wardship and marriage.
The old feudal arrangement of the diet, with its inconvenient divisions, was retained, and the privy council continued to be the depository of power.
The old feudal levies he put aside.
The old feudal ost was but rarely convoked.
The Organic Law thus elaborated was by no means of a liberal character, and amongst other abuses maintained the feudal privileges of the boiars.
The petty rulers of these sections wasted their strength with internecine quarrels and proved quite incompetent to check the lawlessness of their feudal vassals.
The pick of the feudal chivalry composed their ranks; with all Europe to draw upon, their resources seemed inexhaustible, and centuries of political experience made them as formidable in diplomacy as they were valiant in warfare.
The policy of many of Pombal's measures is more than questionable; but his admission of all races to equal rights in the eye of the law, his abolition of feudal privileges, and the firmer organization of the powers of the land which he introduced, powerfully co-operated towards the development of the capabilities of Brazil.
The political institutions are of a feudal character.
The power of the feudal lord over them was much greater.
The proprietors had all the powers of a county palatine and proposed to establish a feudal and aristocratic form of government.
The province declined in wealth and population during the 18th and 19th centuries, a result due less to the want of activity on the part of the inhabitants than to the oppressive manorial and feudal rights and the strict laws of entail and mortmain, which acted as barriers to progress.
The provincial court of the counts of Champagne had long been a distinguished one, and the action of Thibaut the poet, together with the proximity of the district to Paris, made the province less rebellious than most of the great feudal divisions of France to the royal authority.
The public weal was no longer talked about, while the kingdom was plundered both by royal tax gatherers and by unsubdued feudal lords to pay the cost of the war.
The races remained nearly separate, the Irish simply staying outside the feudal system.
The rearrangement, on a feudal basis, of the original returns (as described above) enabled the Conqueror and his officers to see with ease the extent of a baron's possessions; but it also had the effect of showing how far he had enfeoffed "under-tenants," and who those under-tenants were.
The rebels at first demanded no more than that Richard should declare villeinage abolished, and that all feudal dues and services should be commuted for a rent of fourpence an acre.
The researches of HaSdeu, Xenopol and other historians tend to show the existence of a highly organized Vlach society in Transylvania, Oltland and certain districts of Hungary and Moldavia; of a settled commonalty, agricultural rather than pastoral; and of a hereditary feudal nobility, bound to pay tribute and render military service to the Hungarian crown, but enjoying many privileges, which were defined by a distinct customary law (jus valahicum) .
The results of these peace efforts were perhaps surprisingly mediocre, but it must be borne in mind that not only was the military organization of the dioceses always very imperfect, but feudal society, so long as it retained political power, was inherently hostile to the principle and practice of private peace.
The Riksrdd speedily lost its ancient character of a grand council representing the semi- Coming,- feudal landed aristocracy, and became a bureau tional cracy holding the chief offices of state at the good Changes.
The royal artillery battered down the feudal strongholds.
The rude symmetry of the feudal system had been long ago destroyed by partial and unskilful adaptations to modern commercial life, effected at various dates and in accordance with various theories.
The same year he published a pamphlet against feudal aids and the gabelle, for which he was denounced and arrested, but provisionally released.
The shire levies which had served the king so well against the feudal rebels of 1173 were reorganized, with uniformity of weapons and armour, by the Assize of Arms of Ii81.
The spiritual influence of the Church again was exerted to preserve relative peace among feudal princes.
The stipulated consideration was the hand of Eva his only child, and according to feudal law his sole heiress, to whose issue lands and kingdoms would naturally pass.
The suppression of the independence of the feudal aristocracy was inaugurated in 1626 by an edict calling for the destruction of all fortified castles not needed for defence against invasion.
The tenure by which lands were held before 1838 was strictly feudal, resembling that of Germany in the 11th century, and lands were sometimes enfeoffed to the seventh degree.
The terror of the Hunnish invasion, in 899, further assisted the people in their progress towards freedom, for it compelled them to take arms and to fortify their city, rendering Milan more than ever independent of the feudal lords who lived in their castles in the country.
The testimony of Domesday also establishes the existence in the reign of Edward the Confessor of what Stubbs describes as a " large class " of landholders who had commended themselves to some lord, and he regards it as doubtful whether their tenure had not already assumed a really feudal character.
The the cities charters were of the nature of a treaty between the in the citynd its feudal lord and the differed much in Nether Y, Y lands.
The title of giudice was abolished and a feudal marquisate substituted.
The treaty of Bretigny (1360), which fixed his ransom at 3,000,000 crowns, enabled him to return to France, but although he married his daughter Isabella to Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan, for a gift of 600,000 golden crowns, imposed a heavy feudal "aid" on merchandise, and various other taxes, John was unable to pay more than 400,000 crowns to Edward III.
The variety and seeming confusion which reign in feudal society, under uniform controlling principles, rule also in the ages of beginning.
The various inquiries instituted during the middle ages, such as the Domesday Book and the Breviary of Charlemagne, were so far on the Roman model that they took little or no account of the population, the feudal system probably rendering information regarding it unnecessary for the purposes of taxation or military service.
The Venetians, however, maintained their position in Palestine; and their quarters remained, along with those of the Genoese, as privileged commercial franchises in an otherwise feudal state.
The Viking raids were one of the determining causes of the establishment of the feudal monarchies of western Europe, but the untameable freebooters were themselves finally subdued by the Church.
The whole arrangements and character of the building bespeak the rich and powerful feudal lord, not the humble father of a body of hard-working brethren, bound by vows to a life of poverty and self-denying toil.
The word investiture (from vestire, to put in possession) is later than the 9th century; the thing itself was an outcome of feudal society.
The Work To reform the Church in every grade and purge of Gregory the priesthood in order to shield it from feudal VII.
Then came the break up of what remained of feudal Europe and a readjustment under Napoleon, which left the western world with five fairly balanced homogeneous nations.
There is no trace of the distinctive marks of Frankish feudalism in Saxon England, not where military service may be thought to rest upon the land, nor even in the rare cases where the tenant seems to some to be made responsible for it, for between these cases as they are described in the original accounts, legally interpreted, and the feudal conception of the vassal's military service, there is a great gulf.
There was great variety regarding the occasion and amount of these payments, and in some parts of the feudal world they did not exist at all.
There was never any serious danger, but the fact that under the new rgime baronial rebellion was possible, despite of all Williams advantages over other feudal kings, and despite of the fact that the rebels were hardly yet settled firmly into their new estates, had a sinister import for the future of England.
There were no longer two rival monarchies in France; the feudal equilibrium was destroyed, to the advantage of the duchy of France.
These are, briefly speaking, the decay of those great fabrics, church and empire, which ruled the middle ages both as ideas and as realities; the development of nationalities and languages; the enfeeblement of the feudal system throughout Europe; the invention and application of paper, the mariner's compass, gunpowder, and printing; the exploration of continents beyond the ocean; and the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system of astronomy.
These armaments, which cost Matthias 1,000,000 florins per annum, equivalent to 200,00O, did not include the auxiliary troops of the hospodars of Walachia and Moldavia, or the feudal levies of the barons and prelates.
These assizes do not, of course, appear in Ibelin, who was only concerned with the feudal law of the high court.
These do not show, however, the characteristic marks of the actual line of feudal descent.
These were by no means the only rights and duties which could be described as existing in feudalism, but they are the most characteristic, and on them, or some of them, as a foundation, the whole structure of feudal obligation was built, however detailed.
These were lands over which, in distinction front the other feudal lands, rights of pasture, cutting of wood, &c. &c., existed.
They appear to have accepted him as the lawful heir of the Confessor; and they regarded him as their natural protector against feudal oppression.
They are attempts at feudal colonization; and as such they resulted in a number of colonies - the kingdom of Jerusalem, the kingdom of Cyprus, the Latin empire of Constantinople.
They are descendants of feudal days when the mercantile element, being counted as the dregs of the population, lost its self-respect.
They brought from their native Italy a thorough knowledge of the science of government as the middle ages understood it, and the decimation of the Hungarian magnates during the civil wars enabled them to re-create the noble hierarchy on a feudal basis, in which full allowance was made for Magyar idiosyncracies.
They drew a distinction between feudal claims which did and did not carry a moral claim to compensation.
They forced upon the king the Provisions of Oxford (1258), which placed the govern ment in the hands of a feudal oligarchy; they reduced expenditure, expelled the alien favourites from the kingdom, and insisted upon a final renunciation of the French claims. The king submitted for the moment, but at the first opportunity endeavoured to cancel his concessions.
They had now to satisfy the imperial tax-farmers and excisemen, as well as their feudal lords.
They had to combat the feudal nobility, and later, the younger branches of the royal house established in the great duchies, and the main reason for the permanence of their power was, perhaps, the fact that there were few minorities among them.
They in their turn distributed the lands so acquired among their sons and principal emirs on strictly feudal principles, the feudatory lands being styled ziamet and timar, a system long continued by their successors in regard to the territories which they conquered.
They took vows of celibacy, but they frequently gave refuge in Malta to relatives driven to seek asylum from feudal wars and disturbances in their own lands.
They were a usual accompaniment to feudal tenures, and the power which they conferred on great families, being recognized as a source of danger to the state, led to frequent attempts being made by statute to restrict them, both before and after the Union.
They were forms which may rightly be called feudal, but only in the wider meaning in which we speak of the feudalism of Japan, or of Central Africa, not in the sense of 12th-century European feudalism; Saxon commendation may rightly be called vassalage, but only as looking back to the early Frankish use of the term for many varying forms of practice, not as looking forward to the later and more definite usage of completed feudalism; and such use of the terms feudal and vassalage is sure to be misleading.
This " principle of aviticity " (osiseg, aviticum), which survived till 1848, was intended to preserve the large feudal estates as part of the new military system, but its ultimate effect was to hamper the development of the country by preventing the alienation, and therefore the mortgaging of lands, so long as any, however distant, scion of the original owning family survived.'
This acted at once and without any consciousness of difference of function, as judiciary, as legislature, in so far as there was any in the feudal period, and as council, and it exercised final supervision and control over revenue and administration.
This conflict arises not only from naturalization having been granted without the corresponding expatriation having been permitted, but also from the fact that birth on the soil was the leading determinant of nationality by feudal law, and still is so by the laws of England and the United States (jus soli), while the nationality of the father is its leading determinant in those countries which have accepted Roman principles of jurisprudence (jus sanguinis).
This corruption was fatally apparent in the army, the feudal basis of which was sapped by the confiscation of fiefs for the benefit of nominees of favourites of the harem, and by the intrusion, through the same influences of foreigners and rayahs into the corps of janissaries, of which the discipline became more and more relaxed and the temper increasingly turbulent.
This declaration was signed by eighty-one members, including many of the feudal nobles and bishops.
This division contains the palace of the ruler of Tiryns, a building which shows careful and skilful construction, elaborate decoration, and a well-arranged plan, suitable to the wants1 of a wealthy autocratic chief, who lived in a manner which partly recalls the luxury of an Oriental king, and also resembled the feudal state of a medieval baron, surrounded by a crowd of vassals.
This elaboration of the pontifical vestments was contemporaneous with, and doubtless partly determined by, the assimilation of the bishops during those centuries to the type of the great feudal nobles whose ambitions and love of pomp they shared.
This great missionary was well received by the daimios (feudal lords), and though he remained only 22 years, with the help of a Japanese whom he had converted at Malacca he organized many congregations.
This is done in the ancient feudal form, surviving elsewhere only in the conferring of the M.A.
This minor official nobility was the strength of the crown, and was sharply divided in spirit and ambition from the older feudal aristocracy which descended from the original adventurers who had followed William the Conqueror.
This notion of the influence of the tenement is well adapted to feudal notions and makes itself felt again in the case of the pursuit of a fugitive villein.
This point brings us to consider the matter-of-fact conditions of the villeins during the feudal period, especially in the z 2th, 13th and r4th centuries.
This political victory of the aristocracy was merely the consummation of a slow subterranean revolution which by innumerable reiterated blows had sapped the structure of the body politic, and was about to transfer the people of Gaul from the Roman monarchical and administrative government to the sway of the feudal system.
This power rested upon his earnest and commanding personality, and also upon the support which he received from the German church, the possession of a valuable private domain, and the care with which he exacted feudal dues from his dependents.
This represented the triumph of the feudal party, which had gained the support of the arti minori or minor gilds.
This second feudal rebellion was only a distraction to William from his war with his brother Robert, which continued intermittently all through the earlier years of his reign.
This was clearly shown when he attempted to force the great feudal lords to recognize his authority.
This was in all essentials a feudal rebellion of the old type.
This writ was one transferring cases concerning the ownership of property from the courts of the feudal lords to those of the king.
Those holding their charters from a feudal superior and not from the crown were called burghs of regality, their magistrates and council being usually appointed by the overlord or his representative.
Three things must be kept in mind when we compare feudal China with feudal Europe.
Thus feudal overlordship in France had resolved itself into a superficial dominion undermined in all directions by economic realities.
Thus for instance when any feudal institution (be it Gothic, Norman, or Anglo-Saxon) eludes our deciphering faculty from the imperfect records of its use and operation, then we endeavour conjecturally to amend our knowledge by watching the circumstances in which that institution arose."
Thus freed from feudal revolts, William confided the government to men trained in Maio's school, such as the grand notary, Matthew d'Agello.
Thus the udal succession and mode of land tenure (or, that is, absolute freehold as distinguished from feudal tenure) still obtain to some extent, and the remaining udallers hold their lands and pass them on without written title.
To attach his leudes Charles had to give them church lands as precarium, and this had a very great influence in the development of the feudal system.
To conciliate them the barons allowed the Provisions of Westminster to be enacted in 1259, in which the power of feudal courts Was considerably restricted, and many classes of suit were transferred to the royal tribunals, a sufficient proof that the kings judges did not share in the odium which appertained to their master, and were regarded as honest and impartial.
To this end John Locke drafted for them in 1669 the famous Fundamental Constitutions providing for the division of the province into eight counties and each county into seigniories, baronies, precincts and colonies, and the division of the land among hereditary nobles who were to grant three-fifths of it to their freemen and govern through an elaborate system of feudal courts.
To understand the feudal state it is essential to make clear to one's mind that all sorts of services, which men ordinarily owe to the public or to one another, were translated into a form of rent paid for the use of land, and defined and enforced by a private contract.
Towards the close of the rule of the knights in Malta feudal institutions had been shaken to their foundations, but the transition to republican rule was too sudden and extreme for the people to accept it.
Two progressive measures of the highest importance were passed by this diet, one making Magyar the official language of Hungary, the other freeing the peasants' holdings from all feudal obligations.
Ultimately the laws of the 10th and 11th centuries show the beginnings of the frankpledge associations, which came to act so important a part in the local police and administration of the feudal age.
Under French rule, which has modified the old usages in many respects, local government of the Annamese type tends to supplant this feudal system.
Under his severe but beneficent rule, Germany enjoyed, a period of internal quiet such as she had probably never experienced before, but even Henry could not permanently divert from its course the main political tendency of the age, the desire of the great feudal lords for independence.
Under their peaceful rule their territories flourished, until the weakening of the Mogul empire and the rise of the predatory Bundela and Mahratta powers, with the organized forces of which their semi-barbarous feudal levies were unable to cope, brought misfortune upon them.
Under this head may be enumerated also the financial duties of the vassal, though these were not regarded by the feudal law as of the nature of the tenure, i.e.
Underlying all the apparent confusion of fact and practice were certain fundamental principles and relationships, which were alike everywhere, and which really gave shape to everything that was feudal, no matter what its form might be.
Unfortunately for England the kingly power was in the hands of an incapable holder, and feudal anarchy found a plausible mask by adopting the disguise of loyalty to the rightful heiress.
We find that the power of the petty king has made a very considerable advance, and that all the elements of feudalism are present, save that there was no central authority strong enough to organize the whole of Irish society on a feudal basis.
We have traced a definite line of descent for feudal institutions from Roman days through the Merovingian and Carolingian ages to the 10th century.
We know that in feudal law there ran a standing contrast between tenure by custom - villein tenure - and tenure by contract - free tenure.
We use the term "feudal system" for convenience sake, but with a degree of impropriety if it conveys the meaning "systematic."
Were the feudal tie broken, the crown must soon vanish, and the constitution of medieval society undergo a radical change.
What he really did do was to reconstruct society on the essentially feudal theory that the land was a gift from the king, held on conditions of homage and military service.
What was exceptional and subsidiary in feudal times came to obtain general recognition in the course of the 14th and i 5th centuries, and, for this very reason, assumed a very different aspect.
When France had grown strong, under Philip Augustus, the house of Plantagenet still retained a broad territory in Gascony and Guienne, and the house of Capet could not but covet the possession of the largest surviving feudal appanage which marred the solidarity of their kingdom.
When fully constituted, the Cortes consisted of the churchmen, the nobles and the representatives of twenty-seven "good towns" - that is to say, towns which had no feudal lord, and, therefore, held directly of the king.
When he died in January 888 he had not a single faithful vassal, and the feudal lords resolved never again to place the sceptre in a hand that could not wield the sword.
When submission to Rome had somewhat improved his position he squandered his last resources in a new and unsuccessful war with France (1214), and enraged the feudal classes by new claims for military service and scutages.
When the Church and the needy and fanatical nobles of northern and central France destroyed the feudal dynasty of Toulouse and the rich civilization of the south in the Albigensian crusade, it was for Philip Augustus that their leader, Simon de Montfort, all unknowing, conquered Languedoc. At last, instead of the two Frances of the langue doc and the lax gue dorl, there was but one royal France comprising the whole kingdom.
When the function of protection and local supervision could be resumed by the general government the feudal age ended.
When the government of the state had entered into feudalism, and the king was as much senior as king; when the vassal relationship was recognized as a proper and legal foundation of public duties; when the two separate sides of early feudalism were united as the almost universal rule, so that a man received a fief because he owed a vassal's duties, or looked at in the other and finally prevailing way, that he owed a vassal's duties because he had received a fief; and finally, when the old idea of the temporary character of the precarium tenure was lost sight of, and the right of the vassal's heir to receive his father's holding was recognized as the general rule - then the feudal system may be called full grown.
When the great reform of the i i th century had put an end to the direct jurisdiction of the lay abbots, the honorary title of abbot continued to be held by certain of the great feudal families, as late as the 13th century and later, the actual head of the community retaining that of dean.
Whenever he had an opportunity he destroyed a feudal castle, and by destroying the towers which commanded nearly every town in France, he freed such towns as Bourges, for instance, from their long practical subjection to the neighbouring great lord.
Whenever the crown got the better of the feudal spirit of independence, as in France or Naples, it sank from being a sovereign title to a mere social distinction, implying no political power, and not necessarily any territorial influence.
While the Assembly was considering a declaration which might calm revolt, the v i comte de Noailles and the duc d'Aiguillon moved that it should proclaim equality of taxation and the suppression of feudal burdens.
While the governor T rkish was appointed by the feudal lord, the finance minister goUvernors continued to be appointed by the caliph.
While these different feudal systems have shown a general similarity of organization, there has been also great variation in their details, because they have started from different institutions and developed in different ways.
While they were struggling to enforce their claims to universal sovereignty, the royal power, less extravagant but more real, was welding together the feudal states of France and moulding the England of to-day.
With the advent of the Normans, William the Conqueror, with the object of placing a firm feudal barrier between Wales and the earldom of Mercia, erected three palatine counties along the Cymric frontier.
With the development of the feudal system the distinction between the official and the national dukedoms was more and more obliterated.
With the whole available feudal levy of England, and a contingent from Ireland, he advanced from Berwick to Falkirk, which he reached on the 22nd of June 1314.
With these spirits ranged in feudal order in two vast groups beneath Heaven and Earth is associated a third class, those of human beings.