Feudalism
idea · 4 works · 12 mentions · 22 anchored passages
feudalism · the feudal system · Feudal law · Feudal ownership · Fief · feudal anarchy · feudal institutions · feudal law · feudal organisation · feudal ownership
in the texts
Ancient Law
The medieval system linking personal rights and duties to landholding, credited with originating territorial sovereignty.
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.
but substantially, through the rest of Europe feudal subordinations furnished a substitute for a public law;
But then in the ancient world, and in the societies which have not passed through the crucible of feudalism, the Primogeniture which seems to have prevailed never transformed itself into the Primogeniture of the later feudal Europe.
Dissertations on Early Law and Custom
The medieval system that mixed property and sovereignty, causing private inheritance disputes to become dynastic conflicts.
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.
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.
But the South Slavonian House Community I believe to be older in order of development than the Village Community of the Russians, and hence it helps little to throw light on the most difficult of all historico-legal problems, the rise of feudal ownership.
Lectures on the Early History of Institutions
A comparatively modern combination of primitive and Roman law described as obscuring older institutions.
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.
Magna Carta: A Commentary on the Great Charter of King John
The system of land tenure, social obligation, and local jurisdiction that English kings sought to manage and contain.
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.
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.
Ingenious devices were used for checking the feudal excesses so prevalent on the Continent.