IV. Feudal Property

FEUDAL property presents itself under two forms: immovable property, called corporeal by the French feudists, consisting of a castle or manor with its appurtenances and surrounding lands, “as far as a capon can fly;” and movable or incorporeal property, consisting of military service, aids, reliefs, fines, tithes, etc.

Feudal property, of which ecclesiastical property is but a variety, springs up in the midst of village communities based on collective property, and evolves at their expense; after a long series of transformations it is resolved into bourgeois or capitalist property, the adequate form of private property.

Feudal property, and the social organisation which corresponds thereto, serve as a bridge from family, or, more correctly, consanguine collectivism to bourgeois individualism.

Under the feudal system the landlord has obligations and is far from enjoying the liberty of the capitalist – the right to use and abuse. The land is not marketable; it is burdened with conditions, and is transmitted according to traditionary customs which the proprietor dares not infringe; he is bound to discharge certain defined duties towards his hierarchical superiors and inferiors.

The system, in its essence, is a compact of reciprocal services; the feudal lord only holds his land and possesses a claim on the labour and harvests of his tenants and vassals on condition of doing suit and service to his superiors and lending aid to his dependants. On accepting the oath of fealty and homage the lord engaged to protect his vassal against all and sundry by all the means at his command; in return for which support the vassal was bound to render military and personal service and make certain payments to his lord. The latter, in his turn, for the sake of protection, commended himself to a more puissant feudal lord, who himself stood in the relation of vassalage to a suzerain, to the king or emperor.

All the members of the feudal hierarchy, from the serf upwards to the king or emperor, were bound by the ties of reciprocal duties. A sense of duty was the spirit of feudal society, just as the lust of lucre is the soul of our own. All things were made to contribute to the impressing it upon the minds of great and small alike. Popular poetry, that primeval and all-powerful instrument of education, exalted duty into a religion. Roland, the epic hero of feudalism, assailed and overwhelmed by the Saracens at Roncevalles, upbraids his companion-in-arms, Oliver, who complains of Charlemagne’s desertion of them, in this wise:

“Ne dites tel ultrage. Mai seit de l’coer ki el piz se cuardet! Nus remeindrum en estal en la place; Par nus i iert e li colps e li caples.”

“Pur sun seignur deit hum suffrir granzmals; E endurer e forz freiz e granz calz Si’n deit hum perdre del’sanc e de la carn Fier de ta lance e jo de Durendal, Ma bone espée que li Reis me dunat Se jo i moerc, dire poet ki l’avrat, Que ele fut a nobilie vassal!”

Consanguine collectivism had but created the communal unit; feudalism called forth a provincial and national life by knitting together the independent and insulated groups of a province or a nation by a reciprocity of duties and services. Viewed in this light feudalism is a federation of baronies.

The duties which the lord owed his serfs, tenants and vassals were manifold and onerous, but with the decay of feudalism he shook off these duties, while, at the same time, he continued to exact and even aggravated, the dues and obligations which, originally, had been but the recompense of services he had rendered. Not content with neglecting his feudal duties, he raised a claim to the lands of his vassals, as also to the communal domains and forests. The feudists, justly stigmatised as “feudal pens,” maintained that the woodlands, forests, and meadows had immemorially belonged to the lord, who had merely resigned the usufruct thereof to his serfs and vassals. The English feudists made shorter work of it. They fabricated history and declared that at some period –

“sometimes vaguely associated with the feudalisation of Europe, sometimes more precisely with the Norman Conquest – the entire soil of England was confiscated; that the whole of each manor became the lord’s demesne; that the lord divided certain parts of it among his free retainers, but kept a part in his own hands to be tilled by his villeins; that all which was not required for this distribution was left as the lord’s waste; and that all customs which cannot be traced to feudal principles grew up insensibly through the subsequent tolerance of the feudal chief.”

The bourgeois historians and Merlin, the terrible jurist of the convention and destroyer of the communal lands, solicitous to trace the private form of property to the feudal period, adopted the interested thesis of the aristocrats. The history of the genesis and evolution of feudal property will prove the unsoundness of the feudists’ theory and show that seignorial property was built up by fraud and violence.