Feudalism & the Manor System

In 476 CE, the last Roman emperor in the west was deposed by a Germanic chieftain. The actual event was underwhelming — Romulus Augustulus was a teenage puppet, and few contemporaries thought they were witnessing the fall of anything. But the political machinery that had held western Europe together for five centuries was, in fact, gone. No more legions. No more imperial post roads humming with dispatches. No more provincial governors backed by Rome's weight.

What replaced it was not chaos, exactly. It was something more interesting: a patchwork of local arrangements, deals struck between men with swords and men with land, obligations layered on obligations, each relationship defined by what one party could offer the other. Over the course of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, this patchwork hardened into a system. Historians call it A system of political organization in medieval Europe based on the holding of land in exchange for military service and loyalty. Lords granted land to lesser lords and knights, who swore oaths of loyalty and agreed to provide military support. Feudalism was less a formal structure than a web of overlapping personal relationships, each defined by specific mutual obligations., though the people living inside it never used that word. They spoke of lords and vassals, oaths and obligations, honor and service.

The word feudalism comes to us from historians, not from the Middle Ages themselves. Medieval people would have recognized the relationships the word describes. They would not have recognized the tidy pyramid diagrams in textbooks.