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[introduction.]

p In the initial period after the fall of the Roman Empire and the seizure of its territories by the barbarians a drastic cultural decline took place. Soon little trace was left of the outstanding achievements of classical art and science. The barbarians—Germans and Slavs  [131•* —were still living in primitive patriarchal communities and regarded war as a means of requiring all that they were as yet unable or incapable of creating with their own labour. They plundered towns and villages, took wealthy citizens prisoner and then demanded large ransom for them or did away with them before seizing their estates and pasture land; often they would compel the local population to pay them a third of their income. Rome itself was sacked and pillaged on more than one occasion.

p Crafts and trade declined rapidly in the territories which had been seized by the barbarians, and the links between the towns of the Roman Empire (particularly in the former western provinces) and other countries soon disappeared. Each new wave of settlers evolved a self-sufficient agriculture and the Western Empire, which was gradually broken up into a number of barbarian kingdoms, came to consist of a large number of units witk a natural economy.

It would be wrong, however, to suppose that all these fundamental changes were regarded as a scourge. The empire had burdened its citizens with heavy taxes, intolerable oppression from its never-ending army of administrative officials, the billeting of soldiers and cruel exploitation on the part of the local nobility 132 in the provinces working in the pay of the Romans. The local population often welcomed the barbarians as liberators, for however fiercely and sometimes cruelly they squared accounts with the local nobility they usually left the common people unharmed, set the slaves free and lifted the burden of the intolerable oppression of the imperial officials. One of the Romans living at the time of the fall of the empire, a certain Orosius, made the following comment on barbarian invasion: "The barbarians having put down their swords have now taken up ploughshares and started to treat the surviving Romans as comrades and friends. Among these Romans it is even possible to find those who prefer to live with the barbarians in poverty but retaining their freedom than under Roman rule and pay the heavy taxes.”

The Social Structure of the Celtic and Germanic Tribes

p To the north and east of the Roman Empire, in Central and Eastern Europe there lived numerous barbarian tribes. The Romans’ closest neighbours were the Celts in Western Europe and the Germanic tribes in Central Europe. The Celtic tribes were soon driven back by the Germanic tribes. There was some intermingling between the two and at the present time the only extant Celtic peoples are the Irish, the Scots, and the Welsh and the Bretons in north-western France. The subsequent history of the remaining Celtic tribes is bound up with the history of the Germanic peoples. The Germanic tribes lived initially between the Rhine in the west and the Oder in the east. To the east of them lived the Lithuanians, the Finns and numerous Slavonic tribes who pressed them back westwards beyond the Elbe in the first centuries A.D. The Germanic tribes gradually settled throughout the West, occupying the whole of Western Europe and the British Isles. All these tribes were of a primitive patriarchal type and they were divided up into clan groups consisting of large family units.

p Information about the Germanic tribes has been handed down to us by Julius Caesar who encountered them in the middle of the first century B.C. and the ,Roman historian Tacitus, who made a study of their way of life and mores in the latter part of the first century A. D.

p The main occupation of the Germanic tribes at the time of Julius Caesar were hunting, fishing and stockbreeding, but, as Caesar noted, they showed little interest in crop cultivation. The large clan groups would settle on a piece of land, cultivate it communally and then share the produce between themselves. Yet 133 within the space of 150 years agriculture had come to be their main occupation and they started to divide the land up into “family” plots, each family unit consisting of three generations. Each of these families worked together on their common plot and individual ownership of land was not to be encountered among the Germanic tribes either in the time of Caesar or of Tacitus. If the land which they captured was covered with forest they would burn down the trees and then share the land up into family plots. They used primitive wooden ploughs, sowed the same ground several years in succession and then left it to lie fallow for years at a stretch, meanwhile either clearing new pieces of land or cultivating other patches previously cleared. Since the lands where they lived were vast and very thinly populated no clan group was ever short of land. However, such a state of affairs could not last for ever, and soon, in search for new lands, the Germanic peoples started to invade Roman territory which had long been under systematic cultivation.

p These tribes lived in villages and each village was arranged on a communal basis. The arable land belonging to the village was divided up among the family groups and the pasture, woodland and meadows were commonland. The bulk of the population of each village consisted of free members of the tribe, who all enjoyed equal rights.

p However, different ranks were soon to emerge in the barbarian communes. Clan and military aristocracies emerged. Representatives of these groups owned more land than the other ordinary freemen of the clan; they owned more livestock and occasionally had slaves. The slaves in these barbarian communes were obliged to work their master’s land and give up a part of their own produce to their master. Yet the economy of these barbarian communes was not arranged on a slave-holding basis. The slaves lived together with their masters, helped them in their work, and Roman observers were astonished to note the relatively mild treatment they received. Tacitus stated quite clearly that in his time the Germanic people gave their slaves land, allowed them their own plots and homes and demanded from them in return only quit-rent—in other words, he added, the slaves of the barbarians lived like the coloni of Rome.

p These communes were governed by elected representatives who met at assemblies of the whole tribe, village or district. At these assemblies important affairs were deliberated and legal proceedings were conducted. All male adult members of the communes not only worked the land but were warriors as well. The possession of weapons was regarded as the mark of a free member of the commune possessing full rights. The noble and rich members of the communes often gathered together bodies 134 of retainers and with the help of these small detachments made endless raids on neighbouring tribes, preferring, as Tacitus was to record, to gain through bloodshed what others gained in the sweat of their brow. These “nobles” recruited their retainers without taking into account which particular clan they happened to belong to, and this factor bore witness to the gradual disintegration of the clan structure of this primitive society. Sometimes konungr—kings—set themselves up from among the ranks of the aristocracy and then proceeded to unite a number of tribes under their rule and carry out large-scale military expeditions for the purpose of annexing new land.

p Conquests of this type were particularly widespread during the period of the mass migration of the barbarian tribes between the third and fifth centuries which has gone down in history as great migration of the peoples, which resulted in the formation of a large number of barbarian states on the territory of the former Roman Empire.

In the fourth century a large union of barbarian tribes was set up on the Dnieper under the leadership of the Goths led by the chieftain Germanarix. This alliance was to fall prey to new barbarian tribes, nomads from the steppe-lands of Asia. These were the Huns, who shortly before had succeeded in invading China and laying it waste.

The Beginning of the Great Migration of the Peoples.
The Formation of Barbarian Kingdoms

p In the second half of the fourth century the Huns, after crossing the Volga, routed the alliance led by Germanarix and forced the Germanic tribes to move West. Some of the Goths, the West Goths or Visigoths, crossed the frontiers of the Eastern Empire (376) and settled on the territory of present-day Bulgaria. They were cruelly exploited by the imperial administrators and soon rose up in revolt, inflicting a heavy defeat on the Byzantine army. Byzantium was thus obliged to start negotiations with them and took some of them into her service, allowing them to settle in the western part of the empire. Here the Visigoths joined forces under the talented leader Alaric and proceeded to plunder the adjacent territory before marching on Rome in the year 410 and pillaging the city for six days. Soon afterwards Alaric withdrew into southern Italy, where he died. In accordance with a treaty concluded with Byzantium his descendants were given lands between the river Garonne and the Pyrenees. There they settled and gradually extended their power southwards to the whole of Spain. In this way the first barbarian kingdom incorporating south-west France and Spain came into being (419).

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p The Huns, after conquering the Goths in the fourth century, did not remain long on the banks of the Dniester where they had first settled. In the fifth century they gained a resolute and ruthless leader in the figure of Attila, who gathered a large army of Huns and many Germanic tribes and marched westwards. He invaded the Balkans on a number of occasions laying Byzantine lands waste and obliging the emperor to pay him large tribute money. In 450 Attila embarked on an expedition to the West and although he succeeded in devastating the land of the Belgae his march was halted by united Roman and barbarian forces, who defeated him in a battle on the Catalaunian plains (near Chalons-sur-Marne) in the year 451. Although Attila and his remaining troops continued to sack various towns in northern Italy he was not to embark on any new conquests. His empire disintegrated after his death in 453 and the Huns gradually mingled with the local population.

p The march of the Huns into Central Europe forced other Germanic tribes to move on in search of new lands. Forced out of southern Spain by the Vandals, the Goths crossed into North Africa, set up a state there and lived by plunder and piracy in the Mediterranean. In 455 they captured Rome and looted it for two whole weeks. The Burgundians gradually settled the whole of the Rhone valley and the Franks advanced from the Rhine estuary as far as the river Schelde from whence they succeeded in conquering the whole of northern Gaul as far as the river Loire. About the year 449 the Germanic tribes of the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Thuringians invaded Britain and set up a number of barbarian kingdoms, which were eventually (by the ninth century) to be united as England. Meanwhile in 493 the Ostrogoths conquered Italy under the leadership of King Theodoric.

p Although Byzantium succeeded in subduing the Ostrogoths and uniting Italy with the rest of the Empire (555), the Italians who had first greeted the Byzantine troops as liberators soon started to miss the barbarians, since once again they became the victims of cruel taxes and a completely arbitrary bureaucracy. Therefore, it is not surprising that when thirteen years later, in 568, a new Germanic tribe, the Lombards, invaded Italy they had little difficulty in gaining control of Italy and this time for good. The historian Paulus Diaconus writes that at that time many noble Romans fell victim to the insatiable greed of the Lombard dukes, while the remainder were obliged to pay a third of their income to the barbarians.

p To the east of the Germanic tribes there lived a large number of Slavonic tribes. They consisted of three main groups—the West. East and South Slavs. The West Slavs occupied the basins 136 of the Vistula, Oder and Elbe rivers. The Czech and Moravian tribes lived in the upper reaches of the Elbe, Polish tribes on the Vistula and the Oder and the Pomeranian tribes along the southern coast of the Baltic. The Slavs of this period, like the Germanic tribes, lived in primitive communes. Classes and states took shape among the Slavonic tribes later than with the Germanic tribes.

p In the ninth century a large Slav kingdom was set up under the name of Moravia, but it was to be short-lived. In the year 906 this state was under pressure from the Germans in the west and nomadic pastoralist Finno-Ugrian tribes in the east. One part of the Moravian kingdom, Bohemia, retained its independence and was later to become part of the Holy Roman Empire, as Germany was to be called from the twelfth century onwards. In the eleventh century the Czech prince took the title of King of Bohemia and his kingdom, although part of the Holy Roman Empire, enjoyed a large degree of independence.

p In the tenth century the Slavonic tribes in the Vistula and Oder valleys set up a large Polish state. The small states set up by the Pomeranian and Polabian tribes (Laba is the Slav name for the Elbe) did not maintain their independence for long, but fell prey to foreign conquerors in the twelfth century. The East Slavs who lived to the east of the Poles set up a large Russian state in the ninth century.

p The South Slavs started as early as the sixth century to infiltrate Byzantium south of the Danube. At the end of the seventh century, Slavonic tribes who inhabited the lower reaches of the Danube were subjugated by Turkic tribes, the Bulgars, who soon joined forces with the more civilised conquered peoples and Set up a powerful Bulgarian Kingdom. In the ninth century this kingdom held the larger part of the Balkan peninsula and constituted a threat to Byzantium itself. However, at the beginning of the eleventh century Byzantium succeeded in defeating the Bulgars. In the twelfth century the Bulgarian state won back its freedom but in the fourteenth it fell prey to the Ottoman Turks under whose yoke it remained until the nineteenth century.

The central reaches of the Danube were inhabited by SerboCroatian tribes who in the sixth and seventh centuries, after crossing the Danube, set up a number of small kingdoms in the central part of the peninsula. However, these were annexed in the eleventh century by Byzantium, and it was not until the second half of the twelfth century that a powerful Serbian state was set up, which in 1389 was defeated by the Turks at the battle of Kossovo Field and together with other Slavonic tribes was to remain under Turkish rule for many centuries.

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Byzantium from the Fourth to Seventh Centuries A.D.

p In the year 395 A.D. the final break between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires took place and Byzantium became a separate state. Its name was taken from that of the ancient Greek colony on the site of which the new capital of Constantinople had been built. The Byzantines referred to themselves as the Rhomaioi and their state as the "Empire of the Rhomaioi”. The population of Byzantium was extremely heterogeneous, including Greeks and many tribes and Hellenised peoples of the East. However, the predominant language was Greek, which in the seventh century became the official language.

p Byzantium succeeded in stemming the process of disintegration which had befallen the Western Empire as a result of the collapse of the economy based on slave labour. The secret of the vitality of Byzantine Empire lay in its social and economic structure. Less wide use was made of slave labour in agriculture (i.e., on the estates of the large landowners) than in the Western Empire. The slaves had long been allowed to possess their own implements and even their own small plots of land, without which they could not be sold. In other words the slave occupied virtually the same position as the colonus.

p Agriculture based on coloni holdings had taken much firmer root in Byzantium than in the Western Empire. The renting of land, particularly on a long-term basis, had also become a common practice, and land tenure gradually became hereditary. Many more small free-holdings and independent peasant communes survived in Byzantium than in the Western Empire.

p Another factor which favoured the stability of Byzantium was the much smaller number of barbarian invasions to which her rich lands were subjected. Her large cities and trade centres, in particular Constantinople on the Bosporus, Antioch in Syria and Alexandria in Egypt, assured the empire wide commercial links and possibilities for expanding her export trade. Another important advantage Byzantium enjoyed was her role as a trade link between Europe and the countries of the East.

p The fourth, fifth and sixth centuries were marked by the gradual disappearance of the slave-holding society and the gradual but steady development of feudal relations in Byzantium. While in the west the barbarian invasions had led to a collapse of the former military and bureaucratic apparatus, in Byzantium feudalisation progressed within the framework of the former centralised power structure. The evolution of the former slaveowners as powerful feudal landowners was not accompanied by any alterations in the centralised bureaucracy, which provided an ideal basis for the despotic state structure.

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p As the individual feudal lords consolidated their new position and their power in the provinces, the imperial government took steps to limit their influence as far as possible. They were forbidden to have private armies and to build prisons on their estates. The government also attempted to preserve intact the social hierarchy of the slave-holding era, although it was obliged in a number of cases to permit the transfer of slaves to the position of coloni. This reactionary role of the state as it strove to bolster a system which already belonged to the past came particularly clearly to the fore during the reign of Justinian I (527-565). This ruler was an outstanding politician and statesman, in whose reign Byzantium rose to the zenith of its power. The Code of Civil Law (Corpus juris civilis) drawn up at Justinian’s instigation defined the emperor’s practically unlimited powers, protected the privileges of the church and private property, and confirmed the existing state of affairs, by which the slaves and coloni were deprived of all rights.

Justinian’s policies aroused serious discontent among various sections of the population. A wave of uprisings swept several parts of the empire. A particularly serious one was the uprising in Constantinople itself which was to acquire the name of “Nika” (Conquer!). After crushing this uprising, Justinian turned his attention to wide-scale plans in the sphere of foreign policy. The successes he scored in Italy, Spain and Africa soon proved to rest on sand. In the reign of his immediate successors Byzantium was to lose its numerous conquered territories. In addition, the territory of Byzantium itself was invaded by barbarians: in the seventh century Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were conquered by the Arabs.

Barbarian Society

p When the barbarian leaders settled on newly conquered territory or lands they had won back from the Romans, they naturally brought with them their customs and communes. However, the previous inhabitants of the conquered lands had belonged to class societies: together with the free Romans there were slaves and coloni, and the administration of such a society required measures unlike those relied on earlier, which in the new circumstances proved inadequate. As we shall see later, barbarian society was soon to lose its cohesion and develop a class character. All these developments taken together brought about changes in barbarian society which paved the way for the formation of states. The conquerors needed troops, administrative, legal and other organs, which appeared when the need arose for a more complex administration above all in order to hold the conquered 139 peoples in subjection, collect tribute from them and maintain law and order in a society, which was already composed of exploiters and exploited.

p The gradual disappearance of the equality inherent in the primitive communes was inevitably to lead to changes in barbarian society, transforming it from a society of primitive communes into a feudal society.

p What was this process of feudalisation and how did it take place in the new barbarian states? The first part of the question can be answered quite briefly. The land was taken over by the feudal lords, while the working people became dependent on them: once they started working as serfs they were obliged to place their labour or part of their produce at the disposal of the feudal lords. The feudal lords’ ownership of the land, the feudal dependence of the working people and their obligation to pay the ruling class quit-rent—such were the social phenomena which resulted from the process of feudalisation. How now did it come about?

p When barbarian tribes, led by their leader and his army conquered new territory, the leader would divide much of the land among his retainers, who were often allotted the large estates of the Roman nobles, complete with slaves and coloni. The other free members of the tribe received land according to the land rights they had enjoyed in their original settlements. Clan units had lived in village communes: each large family unit had enjoyed hereditary ownership of a holding, consisting of their dwelling complete with an enclosure for their livestock and a strip of arable land; the remaining land of the commune—woods, pasture, waste land and water—formed commonland. The large family units gradually split up into smaller units and the holdings were divided up accordingly. The head of each small family unit became the owner of his holding with hereditary rights and was entitled to use all the village commonland. These small farmers who were initially independent soon lost their land and freedom, and became dependent peasants or serfs in the service of the large landowners.

At the time of the large-scale migrations of the barbarian tribes and the foundation of the first barbarian states, and later, when the barbarians came to settle in new territory and take over large landed estates, the free commoner was often unable to find support and protection among the fellow-members of his original commune, which by this time had become weakened and disorganised. Nor could he hope for it from the leader of his tribe, now the king of a newly formed barbarian state, for the kings now ruled large territories and distance tended to make them inaccessible. The small farmer of those times was obliged 140 to seek protection from the powerful men in his own district and these were more often than not the former members of the tribal leader’s armed retinue who had been allotted large estates by him, or simply rich men with their own armed retainers who seized land at their own risk and expanded their estates by purchasing the plots of free commoners. Once land was subject to individual property rights and could be bought and sold, the formation of large landed estates, on the one hand, and the appearance of subsistence plots and landless peasants, on the other, were only a question of time. Such was the process which took place in barbarian society when new states were being set up on conquered territories.

The Emergence of Feudal Relations
in Western Europe

p The small farmers who sought protection and patronage of the rich and nobility were eventually granted this protection and patronage but at the price of losing their freedom. If they owned no land, they would be granted small strips and sometimes a few animals and sheds to keep them in. But they were obliged to pay for this either by working for their masters (corvee) or with part of their produce (quit-rent). In some cases material assistance granted defenceless small peasants was so great that they bound not only themselves to the service of their new masters, but their descendants as well. Since the living conditions of the free commoners from the former barbarian villages were more or less on a level, this subjugation to the large landowners and wealthy members of society was to become a universal practice.

p Some peasants who had their own farms and sufficient land to make a reasonable living still chose to enter the service of the wealthy and noble in their desire to gain their protection and patronage at all costs. They gave up their rights to their land and handed it over to their new masters, receiving it back again complete with obligations of tenure as if it had never been theirs. Thus the land now became a holding and its former owner a lease-holder. Rich landowners such as the Catholic church and foundations such as monasteries, charterhouses, etc., readily afforded assistance and patronage to the small farmers, who gave up their land to them, only to receive it back again in the form of lease-holdings. The monasteries often returned the holdings to their former owners with an additional small piece of land—usually part of a wood or marsh—under condition that it be prepared (by cutting down the trees or draining the marsh) for sowing. Gradually the inhabitants of the former village 141 communes, small farmers, who worked their own land and had hitherto been freemen, now became dependent peasants or serfs, bound to the land and to the service of large landowners.

p However, more than this was involved in the process. The large landowners gradually acquired new rights over the local peasant population. Since roads were bad and long journeys involved much danger, it was often more or less impossible for a peasant to turn to the king for a just settlement in a conflict of interests between himself and a powerful local lord. Thus, the rich—and this meant first and foremost the powerful feudal lords—-gradually became the wielders of justice, and eventually all administrative power, in the confines of their large estates.

p In order to consolidate their gains, the feudal lords sought from their king special charters according them the rights they had already seized. These charters were known as immunity charters and the new power accorded to the owners of such charters was known as immunity. The word immunis in Latin means exempt, and these charters made the landowners’ property exempt from the control of the king and his administrative officials. An immunity charter gave landowners legal and administrative powers over the whole of their property and often outside its confines, since the barbarian states were weak and badly organised.

p Central and local administration in the real sense of the word did not exist and kings were only too glad to hand over their functions to local lords. This additional power obliged the lords to attend local assemblies of the commoners, where legal proceedings were usually conducted, in order to preside over the maintenance of law and order in a given area. In other words, they were allotted state administrative and legal functions. By way of reward for these services the feudal lords received the revenue gathered in the lands they administered: fines for legal offences, the right to demand from all the common people living within their jurisdiction any kinds of services—to repair roads, build bridges, ferries and even castles and fortifications. In return for the maintenance of law and order at markets, mills, etc., the king and his officers instituted market, road, ferry and bridge tolls which were gathered in by the landowners in possession of immunity charters.

p Furthermore, local leaders received yet a further opportunity which helped to entrench their privileges extremely firmly and over an exceedingly long period. The armies drawn from the common people which followed their leaders out to battle and on campaigns of conquest gradually started to play a less important role. Contact and actual encounters with the Roman troops and an overall advance in military technique made inevitable the 142 introduction of metal weapons and armour. The need for cavalry besides infantry detachments also made itself felt, and horses required metal armour just like their riders. These innovations were to prove very costly: a full suit of armour cost 45 cows, in other words a whole herd of cattle. Obviously, therefore, armour was an impossible luxury for the ordinary small farmer from the village communes. For this reason universal military service was soon to become a thing of the past.

p As time went on the troops in the new barbarian states came to consist more and more of rich subjects who were able to arm themselves in accordance with the requirements of new military techniques. Thus the kings of these new states naturally made liable for military service either those subjects who were already prosperous or others whom they made so by granting royal favours to their own retainers or the local rich in the form of land together with tenant farmers, in return for which they were obliged to appear complete with horse and armour when required. The land distributed to subjects in this way was called a feud and those that received feuds came to be known as feudal lords. At first the feudal lords held their land only so long as they were able to carry out their military obligations, but very soon the land granted to them became their hereditary property, and their military obligations were inherited by their descendants as well.

p So it was that a new ruling class of feudal lords took shape—a class of warrior landowners with large estates (in comparison to the peasants’ small parcels) who within the confines of their own property carried out all the functions of state power. The vast masses of actual producers—the peasants, dependent on these feudal lords—were obliged to pay them for their parcels of land either in the form of corvee or quit-rent, and also to perform various duties and pay various levies to the landowners in their capacity of local representatives of state power.

p The political structure of the new society also underwent significant changes. During the era of the primitive commune and classless barbarian society no states had existed. The basic social organ of the barbarians had been a popular assembly, an assembly of elders, which had resolved all the important affairs of the tribe, questions of war and peace, legal deliberations, the maintenance of law and order. The power of the tribal leaders—dukes or kings—was elective and not coercive, as was often the case in more developed societies, and depended on the authority commanded by the individual candidates and the trust placed in them by the members of the tribe.

State structures took shape during the various conquests, since the subjection of conquered peoples required force and coercion, 143 which could not be provided effectively by the earlier structure of barbarian society. In practice state organs which exerted the necessary force and coercion in the barbarian states were initially the kings and their retinue.

The Empire of Charlemagne

p An example of the way in which barbarian states were set up at that time can be seen in the formation of the Prankish state during the reign of Charlemagne (768-814). The Kingdom of the Franks had no capital in the modern sense of the word. The centre of the state was wherever the king and his retinue happened to be. The king travelled about his kingdom, occupied by the Prankish tribes, together with his retinue from one landed estate to another, where stores of food and other vital supplies were to be found in sufficient quantities to satisfy the needs of his court and his retinue after all that could be duly levied in the form of tribute and taxes from the local population had been gathered in. These tours of the king and his court also served to define the territorial limits of the state, for all those who agreed to pay the king were considered his subjects and the land on which such subjects lived was considered part of his kingdom. Clearly defined frontiers were seldom to be found in barbarian states. In practice their frontiers were the confines in which the king and his retinue exercised their authority by collecting tribute and taxes. One must beware of being misled by the enormous size of Charlemagne’s empire into drawing false conclusions as to its nature.

p Charlemagne’s predecessors Charles Martel (715-741) and his son Pippin the Short had been obliged to reckon with the Arab conquests in Europe. Charles Martel had been extremely hard pressed to it to beat back the attack of the Arabs against the Prankish Kingdom (the battle of Poitiers, 732). The experience of this battle obliged the Prankish kings to improve their army.

p This concern found expression not only in subsequent improvements in military equipment but also in the more frequent grants of land and peasants to all those who might rally to the king’s banner in times of war. Those who were capable of taking on such obligations came from the prosperous strata of society whose members had been able to enhance their wealth by receipt of socalled benefices. These benefices soon became hereditary, and thus the mass-scale distribution of benefices during the reign of Pippin led to a numerical increase and consolidation of the ruling class of powerful warrior landowners, on whom the small farmers 144 inhabiting the land which had been made their benefice now became dependent.

p The considerable increase in the size of the ruling class enabled the Carolingian kings to pursue an active foreign policy and sally forth far beyond the frontiers of the land inhabited by the Franks to subjugate other Germanic tribes. In this way Charlemagne succeeded in extending his power over an enormous area which included present-day France, northern Spain, northern Italy and a large part of western Germany.

p In the year 800, the Pope crowned Charlemagne Emperor and proclaimed his kingdom an empire. In reality this empire was only a loose temporary union of many lands which had been defeated by a successful conqueror: between these lands there were no really firm ties and the empire disintegrated soon after the death of its founder.

This disintegration came about not only because of the fact that the empire was peopled by different tribes, who broke away after Charlemagne’s death and started to set up separate independent dukedoms like those that had existed prior to their conquest. The underlying reasons for this disintegration lay in the very nature of feudalism as a socio-economic and political system. In order to understand the nature of that society it is important to have a clear idea of the structure of its nucleus—the feudal estate—which was to provide the foundation of feudal society for many centuries, from the time of its first emergence right up to its collapse in the conflagration of bourgeois revolutions.

The Development of Feudal Relations
in the Early Middle Ages

p By the beginning of the eleventh century the process of feudalisation was complete throughout the whole of Europe, i.e., all or almost all the land was in the hands of feudal lords, whereas all the working people were to a greater or lesser degree dependent on this ruling class. The hardest form of dependence was that of the serfs, who together with their descendants were bound to the service of their lord and to his land. This meant that the serfs were obliged to work on their overlord’s estate and till his land, hand over to him part of their own and their family’s produce (not only farm produce such as corn, meat and poultry but also craft products such as cloth and leather). In other words the serf was obliged not only to feed his master, his master’s family and household but also to see that they were clothed and shod as well. All these obligations and gifts were referred to as 145 quit-rent and were rendered in return for the right to work the master’s lands, which the latter put at the disposal of the peasants or villeins as they came to be known.

The feudal estate which was run on the pattern outlined above and which formed the nucleus of feudal economy and society was known in Russia as a volchina, in England as a manorial estate and in France and the rest of Europe (since the French pattern was taken as a model) as a seigniory. To understand the essential features of feudal relations and the structure of feudal society it is important to gain a clear picture of the way in which the seigniory was run and the way in which this socioeconomic unit was to influence social and political relations in the Middle Ages.

The Seigniory

p The seigniory was the basic unit of feudal society and the feudal mode of production and for that reason it exerted a decisive influence on society and patterns of political organisation and cultural development as a whole. In the Middle Ages all land, with rare exceptions, belonged to the ruling class of feudal lords who owned estates of varying sizes. The ownership of these estates differed from bourgeois ownership in that it was made subject to various conditions. Each feudal landowner was considered to have received his feud from a seignior of higher rank whose domain had originally been bestowed on him by the king, and he was obliged in return to rally complete with a horse and a suit of armour whenever his seignior should see fit to call on his services. Thus he was his seignior’s vassal and had a number of obligations towards his liege-lord apart from military service: he was obliged to contribute his property towards the ransom for his liege-lord if the latter should be taken prisoner; he was obliged to bestow presents on his seignior if the latter’s eldest son were admitted to Chivalrous Order or if his elder daughter were given away in marriage; he had to assist at the liege-lord’s court during legal proceedings, etc. If a vassal failed to fulfil these duties to his seignior the latter was at liberty to deprive him of his feud.

p The estates of the feudal landowners were divided into two parts: there was the domain belonging personally to the lord of the manor and which was worked by the serfs by way of quitrent and also the serfs’ own holdings. Each serf owned a strip of land which he worked independently with his own tools and draught animals. These strips provided the peasant with enough produce to keep himself and his family and the wherewithal to pay the lord of the manor quit-rent when the latter had to be paid wholly or partly in produce. However harsh the conditions 146 of vassalage binding on the peasant, he was always able to work his own holding independently and the leaders of the serfs’ commune arranged how the domain be sown and what rotation of crops be followed. This meant that the serfs were economically independent of their liege-lord, their own masters, from whom the landowner could receive quit-rent by means of non-economic coercion, either direct or disguised.

p There were various forms of non-economic coercion: the serf’s personal dependence on his liege-lord; the serf’s dependence on his liege-lord for his land (it was accepted that the whole of a landowner’s estate including the serfs’ holdings belonged to the lord of the manor); finally the serf’s dependence on the liege-lord as representative of the state’s legal and administrative power. Since the feudal lords were not only landowners but also warriors and knights, this meant that they had sufficient means at their disposal to compel the serfs to fulfil their obligations whenever necessary.

p The mediaeval economy both in agriculture and, as we shall see later, in industry, was characterised by small-scale production. Agricultural implements were small, designed for individual use, and the same applied to those used by artisans. Thus the material basis of all mediaeval culture was first and foremost peasant labour and a peasant economy, that is, the small-scale holding of the small independent producer in the villages and, at a later stage, the small-scale undertakings of the artisans in the towns.

p The ruling class took no direct part in the production process at all and its positive role at the outset of the feudal era consisted solely in the fact that since the landowners were also warriors they protected the holdings of the small producers from plunder by the followers of other landowners and foreigners, and maintained basic law and order within the country which was an indispensable condition for any regular production. On the other hand the feudal landowners protected and consolidated the system of exploitation typical of the feudal economy.

p Since all material benefits necessary for man’s everyday life were produced in small holdings, the owners of which were economically independent of their seigniors, this meant that by working harder the peasants could obtain a surplus over and above the vital produce for themselves and their families and that which was due the lord of the manor. Therein lay the tremendous progress of the feudal order as compared to slave-holding society.

p Slaves worked their master’s land using their master’s tools and means of production and then handed over all the fruits of their labours to their master, receiving in exchange only that which was absolutely necessary for their subsistence. The slave 147 hated his work and tried to do as little as possible, and would often break his tools and cripple his master’s draught animals in revenge for his violated human dignity.

The mediaeval serf on the other hand, however hard his lot may have been, worked his own independent holding and had a vested interest in raising his level of labour productivity. As a result, feudal society, although built upon the ruins of the slave system and the high cultural achievements of the preceding era, proved capable of more fruitful although extremely gradual development.

Wars in Feudal Society

p The power of feudal lords depended on the number of vassals they had paying them quit-rent. For this reason, the lords of the manor were always trying to increase the number of their vassals, i.e., peasants and town-dwellers in their service, and the easiest way to do this was to take away vassals of their neighbours, other feudal lords like themselves. Thus, local wars among the seigniors were a permanent feature of the Middle Ages. These wars were accompanied by the burning down of whole villages and towns and massacres of the common people, i.e., all those methods which undermine society’s productive forces. It would have been possible to avoid this if the individual lords had observed the codes of law and order obtaining in unified and centralised states. Yet such states were not to be found in the early Middle Ages. The economic factors which led to the disintegration of the barbarian kingdoms into landed estates or seigniories also brought about the decline of the barbarian states. The individual seigniories came to represent centres of political life once they had become the centres of the economic life of feudal society, made up as it was of two main classes. The feudal lords became not only landowners but they also came to represent state power for those living in their domains.

As the landed estates came to grow in size, the barbarian kings’ retainers, once they had received land, and the local nobility after they had grown rich and afforded their protection to the former independent small farmers, took upon themselves the right to judge and mete out punishment to the local common people when law and order were infringed and as warriors they took upon themselves the right to recruit bands of armed retainers. The kings were not powerful enough to prevent the local nobles increasing their powers in this way, and in some respects even encouraged their ambitions, since the only way of rewarding the members of their retinues and their loyal servants when a natural economy was the order of the day and trade was as yet poorly 148 developed, was to grant them land and permit them the right to gather taxes and dues in kind from the local population for their own profit. In this way the powerful landowner within the confines of his land was not only a landowner but also a ruler, that is the individual invested with administrative and legal powers, as far as the commoners working in his particular seignioi-y were concerned.

The Feudal Hierarchy

p At that period there were still kings but real power belonged to local landowners. The most powerful feudal lords who had received their estates direct from the king regarded themselves as the king’s equals, his peers, although they were known as his servants or vassals. Less powerful landowners who had not received their feuds directly from the king but from great nobles were vassals of those same lords and bound to their service. Those with the smallest landed estates were knights and in their turn bound as vassals to more powerful lords. The whole of the ruling class was composed of a complex hierarchical pyramid; at the top there was the king, lower down came the titled lords (such as dukes, earls and the abbots of leading monasteries), then came the barons and last came the ordinary knights. All these groups were united by a common interest in exploiting the working people, and during the early Middle Ages this common interest was sufficient to ensure the peasants’ obedient fulfilment of their obligation to feed, dress and shoe the ruling class. Therefore, at that time no other social patterns existed. While the unity of a barbarian kingdom, even such a large one as Charlemagne’s Empire centred round the king’s retinue, sooner or later these states disintegrated and were divided up into a number of seigniories, the owners of which were bound to one another in vassalage and finally to the king himself. In practice the king’s role was of comparatively little significance, since each lord had direct dealings with his immediate superior whose requirements he was obliged to heed. In the Prankish kingdom, where the feudal social patterns were particularly clearly defined, the principle "My vassal’s vassal is not my vassal" held sway.

The economy of the early Middle Ages was centred primarily on agriculture and village labour, and its social character was determined by the process of feudalisation. Political developments of this period were the transition from the early barbarian kingdom to patchwork barbarian kingdoms in which state power was divided among numerous feudal lords who exerted both economic and administrative powers over their vassal serfs.

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Popular Resistance to Feudal Bondage

It is important to mention yet another important aspect of this early period of the Middle Ages. In Europe the transition from primitive society based on the commune to feudal society was in effect a transition from a pre-class society to a class society which involved the bondage of the broad masses of the working people, the transformation of former free peasants from village communes with hereditary rights over their plots of land into dependent serfs deprived of their freedom and land, which became the property of their liege-lord. The working people were naturally not all prepared to reconcile themselves meekly to this state of affairs. Class struggle, to be found in any class society, seethed in feudal times as well, sometimes latent, sometimes overt. While feudal relations were taking shape serfs frequently rose up to defend their freedom and attempt to re-establish the equality of the primitive communes. Even when feudal relations had become firmly established, the serfs still continued to protest by carrying out their obligations to their masters badly or refusing to carry out various other obligations and not infrequently resorting to open revolt against the exploiting class.

The Role of the Church

p The ruling class was aware that bare-faced violence was not enough to ensure the peasants’ obedience. Apart from the temporal sword they turned to spiritual means as well—the Christian Church (the Catholic Church in Western Europe) which had a monopoly over men’s beliefs and consciences.

p The Church taught that the world had been created by a bounteous god, and that the status quo on earth where some were rich and others poor, some ruled and others obeyed, some administered and others were administered unto, had also been ordained by God and he who protested against God’s ordinances was not only a rebel but also a sinner. Thus every working man was to carry out his duties without question, feed and clothe his lord and work for him not only out of fear, but as a matter of conscience. The bulk of the working people in the Middle Ages consisted of peasants who were inclined to be superstitious and accept the religious ideas taught by the Church, which exerted a powerful influence over them and thus became a significant weapon in the hands of the ruling class in its efforts to preserve and consolidate the feudal system of exploitation.

p The seigniors greatly appreciated the useful role of the Catholic Church and were generous in their donations to it. As a result, 150 the Church even in the early Middle Ages came to own vast lands and its high-ranking officers numbered among the most influential members of the ruling class. Abbots of the larger monasteries and bishops regarded themselves as being on a par with leading nobles such as dukes and counts.

The bishops of Rome, who came to be known as the Popes, were obliged to carry out administrative functions as well as their religious ones, and to protect the local population from the barbarians. They thus came to wield considerable authority and soon put forward claims to spiritual leadership of the whole of the Christian world.