Feudalism

but substantially, through the rest of Europe feudal subordinations furnished a substitute for a public law;

Territorial sovereignty—the view which connects sovereignty with the possession of a limited portion of the earth’s surface—was distinctly an offshoot, though a tardy one, of feudalism.

No sooner, however, has the feudal system prevailed throughout the West, than it becomes evident that Primogeniture has some great advantage over every other mode of succession.

Now among the many things which may be said about the system known to us as Feudalism, one of the least doubtful is that it mixed up or confounded property and sovereignty.

I regard therefore these disputes about the right of succession to feudal monarchies as having their origin in differences of opinion about the inheritance of property, but as transferred by the feudal spirit to the descent of crowns.

One of the most careful, learned, and valuable books ever written about India is Tod’s ‘Rajasthan,’ but the author laboured under the erroneous impression that the most ancient type of society is that which we call feudal.

A veil spread by the lawyers, a veil woven of Roman law and of that comparatively modern combination of primitive and Roman law which we call feudalism, hung between the Highland institutions and the shrewd investigating genius of the Scottish Lowlanders.

Both the sovereignty of the Chief and the ownership of land by the Family or Tribe were in most of Western Europe passed through the crucible of feudalism;

It furnishes us with some wholly new ideas concerning the passage of society from inchoate to complete feudalism, and helps us to complete the account of it derived from Germanic sources.

Ingenious devices were used for checking the feudal excesses so prevalent on the Continent.

Feudalism was the great current of the age—a tide formed by many converging streams, all flowing in the same direction, unreasoning like the blind powers of Nature, carrying away or submerging every obstacle in its path.

Thus, not only was the Exchequer filled with fines and fees, but, insidiously and without the danger involved in a frontal attack, Henry sapped the strength of the great feudal magnates, and diverted the stream of litigants from manorial courts to his own.