Feudalism Sentence Examples

Feudalism was not at any time a national institution.

Feudalism formed the starting-point also of the later social nobilities of Europe.

The uniting of the personal and the land sides of feudalism came long after the conquest, and in a different way.

In studying the origin and growth of political feudalism, the distinction is easy to make.

Feudalism could not be established, however, until the great of the land had adopted them for themselves, and had begun to enter the clientage of others and to hold lands by the precarium tenure.

During these wars feudalism made rapid advance in Germany.

They were willing enough to admit the abstract claims of the Empire; but in the world of feudalism there was a multitude of established customs and rights which rudely conflicted with these claims, and in action, remote and abstract considerations gave way before concrete and present realities.

But the history of France during the 11th and 12th centuries does not entirely consist of these painful struggles of the Capet dynasty to shake off the fetters of feudalism.

Despite the queens express prohibition, the insurrectionary assembly of the Chambre Saint Louis criticized the whole financial system, founded as it was upon usury, claimed the right of voting taxes, respect for individual liberty, and the suppression of the intendants, who were a menace to the new bureaucratic feudalism.

When this great convention met the king must show himself ready to recognize that great changes have taken place, that feudalism and absolutism have for ever disappeared, and that a new relation between king and people has arisen, which must be loyally observed on both sides for the future.

And thus the conception of knighthood as of something distinct from feudalism both as a social condition and a personal dignity arose and rapidly gained ground.

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.

For the time, feudalism in truth meant that lands and offices were held on condition of service; the kinf was the genuine ruler, not only of freemen, but of the highest vassals in the nation.

Great kings and emperors came after him, but none of them possessed the direct, absolute authority which he freely wielded; even in the case of the strongest the forms of feudalism more and more interposed themselves between the monarch and the nation, and at last the royal authority virtually disappeared.

It is the prose epic of feudalism, and its romantic spirit, its high ideals, its fantastic gallantry, its ingenious adventures, its mechanism of symbolic wonders, and its flowing style have entranced readers of such various types as Francis I.

In 1904 appeared the third volume, La Renaissance de Petal, in which the author describes the efforts of the Capetian kings to reconstruct the power of the Frankish kings over the whole of Gaul; and goes on to show how the clergy, the heirs of the imperial tradition, encouraged this ambition; how the great lords of the kingdom (the "princes," as Flach calls them), whether as allies or foes, pursued the same end; and how, before the close of the 12th century, the Capetian kings were in possession of the organs and the means of action which were to render them so powerful and bring about the early downfall of feudalism.

He owed little to the historians of feudalism who knew what feudalism was, but not how it came about.

The whole of the administration was in the hands of the king with his vizier and other court officials; no trace of the feudalism of the Middle Kingdom survived.

During the whole course of the 16th century the monarchical form of government was in every large country, with the single exception of Poland, rising on the ruins of feudalism.

Feudalism was not yet dead, and in the north and west there were medieval franchises in which the royal writ and common law hardly ran at all.

David, educated in England by Normans, was the maker of a Scotland whereof the anglicized part at least was now ruled by Anglo-Norman feudalism and Anglo-Norman municipal David I.

Surrounded by men like these Louis fought the last great battle of French royalty with feudalism.

The Germanic tribes were still adjusting themselves and slowly learning to combine their primitive institutions with the remains of those of Rome; the premature union under Charlemagne gave way before new invasions, and anarchy became crystallized in feudalism.

These qualities she owed to her material prosperity, to her freedom from feudalism, to her secularized church, her commercial nobility, her political independence in a federation of small states.

Henry's reign marks the height of feudalism.

The purpose of the French Revolution was to abolish feudalism in order to establish capitalism.

Feudalism, as the antithesis of this orderly treatment, had to be overthrown before national finance could become established.

Florence affords an instructive specimen; but the passage from feudalism to the national state under the authority of monarchy made the cities and country districts parts of a larger whole.

At length, in the 12th century, the inevitable conflict came between the republicanism of the Lombard cities and the German feudalism which still claimed their allegiance in the name of the Empire.

Originally and properly applicable to a status recognized by feudalism, the term vassal state has been used to describe the subordinate position of certain states once parts of the Ottoman Empire, and still loosely connected therewith.

Feudalism died hard, but since 1860 has been practically extinct; and so far as the Maronites own a chief of their own people it is the "Patriarch of Antioch and the whole East," who resides at Bkerkeh near Beirut in winter, and at a hill station (Bdiman or Raifun) in summer.

Villeins and serfs in France rise gradually in the social scale, redeem many of the onerous services of feudalism and practically acquire tenant-right on most of the plots occupied by them.

On the whole serfdom appears as a characteristic corollary of feudalism.

With the new monarchy there had come into England the anarchic spirit of continental feudalism.

Nothing proves more conclusively the strength of the Angevin monarchy, and the decreasing power of feudalism, than that an unpopular king like John.

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.

He not only terminated a disastrous civil war and brought under control the spirit of ancient feudalism, but with a clear survey of the conditions of foreign powers he secured England in almost uninterrupted peace while he developed her commerce, strengthened her slender navy and built, apparently for the first time, a naval dock at Portsmouth.

His increased power came rather from moral value, from the prestige attaching to one who had given proof of it, than from actual authority over men or centralization; this is shown by the division between the Empire and feudalism.

The very multiplication of offices, so noticeable at this time, furthered this triumph of feudalism by multiplying the links of personal dependence, and neutralizing more and more the direct action of the central authority.

Hence the sixty years of terror and confusion which came between Charlemagne and the death of Charles the Bald suppressed the direct authority of the king in favor of the nobles, and prepared the way for a second destruction of the monarchy at the hands of a stronger power (see FEUDALISM).

If they acknowledged the kings authority feudalism, at the assemblies of Ytz (near Thionville) in 844,

In the disordered state of society official stability was a valuable warrant of peace, and the administrative hierarchy, lay or spiritual, thus formed a mould for the hierarchy of feudalism.

This event completed the evolution of the forces that had produced feudalism, the basis of the medieval social system.

Feudalism had gained ground in the 8th century; feudalism it was which had raised the first Carohingian to the throne as being the richest and most powerful person in Austrasia; and Charlemagne with all his power had been as utterly unable as the Merovingians to revive the idea of an abstract and impersonal state.

Feudalism claimed its new rights in the capitulary of Quierzy-surOise in 857; the rights of the monarchy began to dwindle in 877.

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.

By virtue of all these organs of government the throne guaranteed peace, justice and a secure future, having routed feudalism with sword and diplomacy.

As Paris had taken her Bastille, it remained for the towns and country districts to take theirsall the Bastilles of feudalism.

Public opinion became republican from an excess of patriotism, and owing to the propaganda of the Jacobin club; while the decree of the 25th of August 1792, which marked the destruction of feudalism, now abolished in principle, caused the peasants to rally definitely to the Republic. -

Sometimes they were sent to organize and govern a march, sometimes they were rewarded with benefices, and as, with the growth of feudalism, these developed into hereditary fiefs, the word vassus or vassallus was naturally retained as implying the relation to the king as overlord, and was extended to the holders of all fiefs whether capital or mediate.

The landowning aristocracy are the ruling class under feudalism.

Rome was the apex of a pyramid called feudalism.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.

This arrangement, called feudalism, became the basic political and military system of Europe for the next 400 years (see FEUDALISM ).

Feudalism was introduced in England in 1066 following the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest Who was responsible for introducing feudalism was introduced in England in 1066 following the Battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest Who was responsible for introducing feudalism in England?

History had given the emerging capitalist class the task of ending feudalism.

Feudal Culture & Society With a few exceptions, the society and culture of the EH world is that of western European feudalism.

Thus began the Norman occupation which was to replace much of Irish tribal society with medieval feudalism.

The fight against corporate feudalism is not restricted to North America.

These were the powerful effects during the decline of European feudalism.

What is already developing is the takeover of democratic society by a form of bastard feudalism.

His aim was to base a Marxist interpretation of English feudalism on research in the archives on the primary sources.

Fief Middle Ages era, period, life, age and times fief Middle Ages era, period, life, age and times Fief Definition The Medieval Fief - Feudalism Who granted the Fief?

It was almost inevitable in the transition from feudalism to democracy that this intermediate ground should be traversed; and the peculiar Italian phrases, primo popolo, secondo popolo, terzo pa polo, and so forth, indicate successive changes, whereby the oligarchy passed from one stage to another in its progress toward absorption in democracy or tyranny.

At most, therefore, it may be admitted that the Crusades contributed to the dissolution of feudalism by putting property on the market and disturbing the validity of titles; that they aided the development of towns by vastly increasing the volume of trade; and that they furthered the growth of scholasticism by bringing the West into contact with the mind of the East.

The crowd of varying forms should not prevent us from seeing that we can trace through their confusion the line along which the characteristic traits and institutions of European feudalism, as it actually was, were growing constantly more distinct.

This is a struggle not against the foundations of capitalism but for purging all the remnants of feudalism.

Feudalism was replaced by absolutism and many territories seceded from the Empire to form their own centralized states.

The worst governed part of the peninsula was the south, where feudalism lay heavily on the cultivators and corruption pervaded all ranks.

Hence arise various mistaken beliefs, such as the belief in revelation which not only injures the moral As feudalism passed from its age of supremacy into its age of decline, its customs tended to crystallize into fixed forms.

The predominance of the nobility in this way became as characteristic of feudalism in the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem as the supremacy of the crown was of contemporary feudalism in England; and that predominance expressed itself in the position and powers of the high court, in which the ultimate sovereignty resided.

In either case there is an importation of Western feudalism into a country originally possessed of Byzantine institutions, but affected by an Arabic occupation.

But, in our opinion, when feudalism was established, the right of levying it did not belong to every lord, but only to the lord having the haute justice.

Those whom he enfeoffed with land held it according to the law of Norman feudalism, which was already becoming precise.

His care for the common people was sincere and constant, but his beneficial efforts in this direction were thwarted by the curious interaction of two totally dissimilar social factors, feudalism and Hussitism.

Thus, at the very time when the modernization of the means of national defence had become the first principle, in every other part of Europe, of the strongly centralized monarchies which were rising on the ruins of feudalism, the Hungarian magnates deliberately plunged their country back into the chaos of medievalism.

This is the great social fact - the failure of government to perform one of its most primary duties, the necessity of finding some substitute in private life - extending in greater or less degree through the whole formative period of feudalism, which explains the transformation of institutions that brought it into existence.

This change did not occur, however, without some modification of the Roman customs. The comitatus made contributions of its own to future feudalism, to some extent to its institutional side, largely to the ideas and spirit which ruled in it.

The advantages, however, which it afforded were obvious, and this side of feudalism developed as rapidly after the conquest as the personal.

The new German government furnished no better protection from local violence, nor was it able any more effectively to check the practices which were creating feudalism; indeed for a long time it made no attempt to do so.

That period had practically ended, however, before these two institutions showed any tendency to join together as they were joined in later feudalism.

This process had probably already begun in a small way in the growth of institutions which belong to the economic side of feudalism, the organization of agriculture on the great estates.

When this stage was reached the formative age of feudalism may be considered at an end.

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.

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.

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.

The temptation to use the larger part of any space allotted to the history of feudalism for a discussion of origins does not arise alone from greater interest in that phase of the subject.

It is almost impossible even with the most discriminating care to give a brief account of completed feudalism and convey no wrong impression.

Feudalism in its most flourishing age was anything but systematic. It was confusion roughly organized.

In the ceremony of homage and investiture, which is the creative contract of feudalism, the obligations assumed by the two parties were, as a rule, not specified in exact terms. They were determined by local custom.

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.

Ideally regarded, feudalism covered Europe with a network of these fiefs, rising in graded ranks one above the other from the smallest, the knight's fee, at the bottom, to the king at the top, who was the supreme landowner, or who held the kingdom from God.

When conditions so changed that government could free itself from its dependence on the baron, feudalism disappeared as the organization of society; when a professional class arose to form the judiciary, when the increased circulation of money made regular taxation possible and enabled the government to buy military and other services, and when better means of intercommunication and the growth of common ideas made a wide centralization possible and likely to be permanent.

Feudalism had performed a great service, during an age of disintegration, by maintaining a general framework of government, while allowing the locality to protect and care for itself.

At the moment, however, when feudalism was disappearing as the organization of society, it gave rise to results which in a sense continued it into after ages and even to our own day.

They drew from it their titles and ranks and many of their regulative ideas, though these were formed into more definite and regular systems than ever existed in feudalism proper.

Vicarious interest, however, attaches to the productions of the Mito School on account of the political influence they exercised in rehabilitating the nations respect for the throne by unveiling the picture of an epoch prior to, the usurpations of military feudalism.

Yoritomo, the founder of feudalism at the close of the 12th century, was too great a statesman to underestimate the value of roads and posts.

Feudalism is practically extinct among them and with the decline of the Druses, and the great stake they have acquired in agriculture, they have laid aside much of their warlike habit together with their arms. Even their instinct of nationality is being sensibly impaired by their gradual assimilation to the Papal Church, whose agents exercise from Beirut an increasing influence on their ecclesiastical elections and church government.

It should be added, however, that among the Druses of Shuf, feudalism has tended to re-establish itself, and the power is now divided between the Jumblat and Yezbeki families, a leading member of one of which is almost always Ottoman kaiynakam of the Druses, and locally called amir.

In its internal history the exarchate was subject to the influences which were everywhere, in central and western Europe at least, leading to the subdivision of sovereignty and the establishment of feudalism.

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.

They essentially resembled the obligations undertaken towards a Teutonic chief by the members of his "comitatus" or "gefolge," one of the institutions from which feudalism directly sprang.

Marches were formed on all the borders of the empire, and the exigencies of military service led to the growth of a system of land-tenure which contained the germ of feudalism.

The church was too powerful, an incipient feudalism was present, and there was no real bond of union between the different races that acknowledged his authority.

In France royalty acquired little by little a preponderant influence over feudalism and used its increased prestige to substitute for the Truce of God the peace of the state.

Feudalism had a phraseology to express the varieties of fiefs which existed under it; modern international law has no generally-accepted terminology for the still greater variety of states which now exist.

In the 10th century it passed under the titular sway of Liege, and remained the fief of the prince-bishopric till the French revolution put an end to that survival of feudalism.

During his brief reign at Naples, Joseph effected many improvements; he abolished the relics of feudalism, reformed the monastic orders, reorganized the judicial, financial and educational systems, and initiated several public works.

Feudalism was abolished; the Code Napoleon was introduced; the Jews were freed from repressive laws; and education received some impulse in its higher departments.

There is only one answer; the principal cause of this complete and irretrievable collapse is to be sought for in the folly, egotism and selfishness of the Polish gentry, whose insane dislike of all discipline, including even the salutary discipline of regular government, converted Poland into something very like a primitive tribal community at the very time when every European statesman, including the more enlightened of the Poles themselves, clearly recognized that the political future belonged to the strongly centralized monarchies, which were everywhere rising on the ruins of feudalism.

It is usual to speak of the English burgagetenure as a relic of Saxon freedom resisting the shock of the Norman conquest and its feudalism, but it is perhaps more correct to consider it a local feature of that general exemption from feudality enjoyed by the municipia as a relic of their ancient Roman constitution.

Beyond destroying the brick-and-mortar remains of feudalism, he did nothing for the people.

Europe was being split up under the influence of feudalism; Christendom was assailed by the barbarians, Norsemen, Saracens and Huns; at Rome the papacy was passing into the power of the local aristocracy, with whom after Otto I.

It was raised above feudalism only to be abased before the two directing forces of the reformation, the papacy and the religious orders.

By drawing to their side all the forces of the ecclesiastical body to combat feudalism, Urban II.

Europe refused to take any direct action against the Mussulman, but Latin feudalism, assembled at Venice, diverted the crusade by an act quest of conof formal disobedience, marched on Constantinople, seized the Greek Empire and founded a Latin Empire in its place; and Innocent had to accept the fait accompli.

That a sovereign like St Louis should be able to associate himself officially with the feudalism of his realm to repress abuses of church jurisdiction; that a contemporary of Philip the Fair, the lawyer Pierre Dubois, should dare to suggest the secularization of ecclesiastical property and the conversion of the clergy into a class of functionaries paid out of the royal treasury; and that Philip the Fair, the adversary of Boniface VIII., should be able to rely in his conflict with the leader of the Church on the popular consent obtained at a meeting of the Three Estates of France - all point to a singular demoralization of the sentiments and principles on which were based the whole power of the pontiff of Rome and the entire organization of medieval Catholicism.

He distinguished himself originally as one of the soldier politicians who contributed so much to the overthrow of feudalism and the restoration of the administrative power to the throne.

But when kings and kingdoms were in conflict, and distant and prolonged expeditions became necessary, it was speedily discovered that the unassisted resources of feudalism were altogether inadequate.

Thus Celtic principles, as opposed to the western principles of chartered feudalism, did not perish in Scotland without a long and severe struggle.

At the same time it traces the birth of feudalism from the germs of the Gallo-Roman personal comitatus; and shows how the bond that united the different parties was the contract of the fief; and how, after a slow growth of three centuries, feudalism was definitely organized in the 12th century.

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.

This revolution is in accordance with - indeed it is one side of - the movement towards feudalism which was the great feature of this period.

The idea that the ruler possessed a normal income in certain rents and dues of a quasi-private character, which on emergency he might supplement by calls on the revenues of his subjects, was a bequest of feudalism which gave way before the increasing power of the state.

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.

But the hereditary aristocracy also survived, and feudalism.

Up to this point the prince had ruled wisely; he had founded the universities of Bucharest and Jassy; his reforms had swept away the last vestiges of feudalism and created a class of peasant freeholders.

In the 11th century, with the growth of feudalism, all feudatories holding in chief of the Crown ranked as " princes," from dukes to simple counts, together with archbishops, bishops and the abbots of monasteries held directly of the emperor.

Many of them came to own land in ten or a dozen counties remote from each other, a fact which was of the greatest importance in determining the character of English feudalism.

In France, on the contrary, the throne was exalted beyond rivalry, raised far above a feudalism which never again ventured on acts of independence or rebellion.

The feudalism of Languedoc was all that now remained to conquer.

He was the actual creator of the communes, although an interested creator, since they made a breach in the fortress of feudalism and extended the royal authority far beyond the kings demesne.

The hour had come for Dante, the great Florentine poet, to curse the man who was to dismember the empire, precipitate the fall of the papacy and discipline feudalism.

Thanks to their action, feudalism was attacked in its landed interest in the person of the constable de Bourbon; feudalism in its financial aspect by the execution of superintendent Semblancay and the special privileges of towns and provinces by administrative centralization.

Although he broke off the Magyar tribal system, encouraged the private ownership of land, and even made grants of land on condition of military service - in order to secure an armed force independent of the national levy - he based his new principle of government, not on feudalism, but on the organization of the Frankish empire, which he adapted to suit the peculiar exigencies of his realm.

The weakness and prodigality of the later Arpáds, the depopulation of the realm during the Tatar invasion, the infiltration of western feudalism and, finally, the endless civil discords of the 13th century, brought to the front a powerful and predacious class of barons who ultimately overshadowed the throne.

Yet we still make spasmodic efforts to dress ourselves in the colors of medieval feudalism.

Feudalism was abolished in 1836, and in 1848 complete political union with Piedmont was granted, the viceregal government being suppressed, and the island being divided into three divisions of which Cagliari, Sassari and Nuoro were the capitals.

In this way, Qwing to the dislocation of the ancient aristocracy, to the enlarged jurisdiction,of a power so democratic as the episcopate, and to the increased privileges of the burghs, feudalism received a powerful check in Italy.

He resolved to suppress many abuses, but, above all things, to check feudalism and limit the power of the nobles.

This is especially clear from clause xvi., which decrees that the title and estates of the lords-lieutenant of counties should not be hereditary, thus attacking feudalism at its very roots, while clause xiv.

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.

There was actually in fact and practice a larger uniformity than this short list implies, because these principles tended to express themselves in similar forms, and because historical derivation from a common source in Frankish feudalism tended to preserve some degree of uniformity in the more important usages.

This was particularly the case in parts of France and Germany where feudalism continued to regulate the property relations of lords and vassals longer than elsewhere, and where the underlying economic feudalism remained in large part unchanged.

The French system of taxation was maintained because it brought in ampler revenues; but feudalism, the antiquated legislation and bureaucracy were revived, and all the officers and officials still living who had served the state before the Revolution, many of them now in their dotage, were restored to their posts; only nobles were eligible for the higher government appointments; all who had served under the French administration were dismissed pr reduced in rank, and in the army beardless scions of the aristocracy were placed over the, heads of war-worn veterans who had commanded regiments in Spain and Russia.

At the same time, if our text is thus late, it must be remembered that its content gives us the earliest and purest exposition of French feudalism, and describes for us the organization of a kingdom, where all rights and duties were connected with the fief, and the monarch was only a suzerain of feudatories.

The dissolution of feudalism, the development of towns, the growth of scholasticism, all these and much more have been ascribed to the Crusades, when in truth they were concomitants rather than results, or at any rate, if in part the results of the Crusades, were in far larger part the results of other things.

The description of this institution which has come down to us from Roman sources of the days when feudalism was beginning is not so detailed as we could wish, but we can see plainly enough that it met a frequent need, that it was called by a new name, the patrocinium, and that it was firmly enough entrenched in usage to survive the German conquest, and to be taken up and continued by the conquerors.

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.

All round and about this line of descent there was a crowd of varying forms branching off more or less widely from the main stem, different kinds of commendation, different forms of precarium, some of which varied greatly from that through which the fief descends, and some of which survived in much the old character and under the old name for a long time after later feudalism was definitely established.'

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.

It is better to say that European feudalism is not to be found in England before the Conquest, not even in its beginnings.

There are thus distinguished at the beginning those two great sides of feudalism which remained to the end of its history more or less distinct, the personal relation and the land relation.

Although he broke off the Magyar tribal system, encouraged the private ownership of land, and even made grants of land on condition of military service... he based his new principle of government, not on feudalism, but on the organization of the Frankish empire, which he adapted.

It should be noted that from its very beginning the land relationship of feudalism was not created primarily for the grantor's income, but that it emphasized in the most striking way his continued ownership.

Itcompleted the transformation of the army into a vassal army; it completed the recognition of feudalism by the state, as a legitimate relation between different ranks of the people; and it recognized the transformation in a great number of cases of a public duty into a private obligation.