vassal, in feudal society, one invested with a fief in return for services to an overlord. Some vassals did not have fiefs and lived at their lord’s court as his household knights. Certain vassals who held their fiefs directly from the crown were tenants in chief and formed the most important feudal group, the barons. A fief held by tenants of these tenants in chief was called an arriere-fief, and, when the king summoned the whole feudal host, he was said to summon the ban et arriere-ban. There were female vassals as well.
The vassal owed fealty to his lord. A breach of this duty was a felony, regarded as so heinous an offense that in England all serious crimes, even those that had nothing to do with feudalism proper, came to be called felonies, since, in a way, they were breaches of the fealty owed to the king as guardian of the public peace and order.
The vassals’ rights over the fiefs grew larger and larger in course of time, and soon fiefs became hereditary in the sense that investiture could not be withheld from an heir who was willing to do homage. The rules of inheritance tended to safeguard an undivided fief and preferred the eldest among the sons (primogeniture). This principle was far from absolute; under pressure from younger sons, parts of an inheritance might be set apart for them in compensation (see appanage). Vassals also acquired the right to alienate their fiefs, with the proviso, first, of the lord’s consent and, later, on payment of a certain tax. Similarly, they obtained the right to subinfeudate—that is, to become lords themselves by granting parts of their fiefs to vassals of their own. If a vassal died without heir or committed a felony, his fief went back to the lord
Europe were rendered dependent on their land and on their lord. Its basic unit was the manor, a self-sufficient landed estate, or fief that was under the control of a lord who enjoyed a variety of rights over it and the peasants attached to it by means of serfdom. The manorial system was the most convenient device for organizing the estates of the aristocracy and the clergy in the Middle Ages in Europe, and it made feudalism possible. Under other names the manorial system was found not only in France, England, Germany, Italy, and Spain but also in varying degrees in the Byzantine Empire, Russia, Japan, and elsewhere. The manorial system’s importance as an institution varied in different parts of Europe at different times. In western Europe it was flourishing by the 8th century and had begun to decline by the 13th century, while in eastern Europe it achieved its greatest strength after the 15th century.
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