When the Carolingian empire broke apart, power drained downward. Kings in France often could not reach beyond their own estates, and counts and lesser lords took over the work of keeping order, judging disputes and collecting dues. From the late 900s they built castles, at first earth mounds topped with wooden towers, later in stone. A castle let a few dozen mounted warriors dominate the country for miles around.

Lords and vassals

Personal bonds held this world together. A free man could commend himself to a more powerful lord and become his vassal. In the ceremony of homage, the vassal placed his joined hands between the hands of his lord and declared himself the lord's man; he then swore an oath of fealty, or loyalty, often on holy relics. In return the lord promised protection and often granted a fief, from the Latin feudum. A fief was land, or another source of income, held in return for service, above all military service. Over time fiefs became hereditary, so that sons owed loyalty to the sons of their fathers' lords.

In 1020 Bishop Fulbert of Chartres wrote a letter to William V, duke of Aquitaine, explaining what fealty meant. A faithful vassal, he wrote, should keep in mind six words: "safe, secure, honorable, useful, easy, possible", meaning he must do nothing to harm his lord's body, castles, honor, interests or plans. But Fulbert insisted that the obligations ran both ways: the lord owed his vassal the same faithfulness in return.

Those who pray, fight and work

Churchmen explained the social order with a famous scheme. Around 1025 Bishop Adalbero of Laon described society as made of those who pray, those who fight and those who work. It was an ideal, not a census. It left out merchants and townspeople, and it served to justify the place of clergy and knights above the laboring majority.

The fighters were often the problem. Knights fought each other in endless local feuds and took out their quarrels on their enemies' peasants. The church responded with the Peace of God, a movement of church councils from the late 900s that tried to protect clergy, peasants and church property from knightly violence. Its companion, the Truce of God, banned fighting on certain days of the week and in holy seasons. Over time the ideals of chivalry tried to turn the warrior into a Christian knight, protector of the weak, with mixed success.

The trouble with "feudalism"

Older textbooks summed all this up with a pyramid: the king at the top granting fiefs to great lords, who granted smaller fiefs to knights, with peasants at the bottom. They called the system feudalism. But medieval people never spoke of "feudalism"; the word was coined by early modern lawyers and eighteenth century writers. Montesquieu wrote of feudal laws, Adam Smith of feudal government, and the French revolutionaries of 1789 abolished what they called the feudal regime. Marxists later used the word for a whole economic system in which lords extracted labor and produce from peasants.

Twentieth century historians tried to define it more carefully. Marc Bloch, in Feudal Society (1939 to 1940), described feudalism as a whole society bound together by personal ties of dependence, while the Belgian historian Francois-Louis Ganshof defined it narrowly as the legal relations among lords, vassals and fiefs.

Then came the critics. In 1974 the American historian Elizabeth A. R. Brown argued that the word had become a construct that forced varied evidence into a single tidy model, and urged historians to drop it. Susan Reynolds argued in Fiefs and Vassals (1994) that the neat system of fiefs and vassalage was largely built by later academic lawyers, from the 1100s on, and then read back into earlier centuries. Defenders reply that a word can be useful shorthand if it is defined clearly and not stretched. Most medievalists now use "feudal" with care, name the time and place, and describe actual relationships instead of a universal pyramid. England after 1066, where Norman kings imposed an unusually systematic order, looks different from tenth century France, and both look different from Italy or Scandinavia.

Worked example: Hugh of Lusignan's complaint

An extraordinary document from Aquitaine, written around 1030 and known as the Conventum, tells the story of Hugh of Lusignan, a vassal of the same Duke William V to whom Fulbert wrote. Hugh lists promise after promise the duke made him, a marriage, a castle, a relative's inheritance, and recounts how each one fell through while the duke still demanded his loyalty. Hugh fought, negotiated and finally made a new agreement.

Compare it with Fulbert's letter. Fulbert gives the ideal: mutual faith and clear duties. Hugh shows the practice: bargaining, broken promises, rival claims and violence, with the duke holding most of the cards. Neither looks like a tidy pyramid, which is the point Brown and Reynolds made. If you start from the textbook model, Hugh's story looks like a breakdown of the system. If you start from the evidence, it looks like the normal working of power among people who used oaths and land grants as tools in an endless negotiation.